


Waves are Universal

by openended



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Reality, Apocalypse, Community: stargate_summer, F/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:49:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternate realities are old news for SG-1. So is time travel. But when half of the team steps onto an Earth that's not only not theirs, but thirty years in the future, old news suddenly means not fully informed. With that Earth all but destroyed by an enemy more devastating than they've ever imagined, hope lies within a young scientist who simply wants to forget. They say there's no place like home. But between battling aliens, memories, tomatoes, math that just won't make sense, and the occasional zombie...will they ever get there? Or will they find a way to make this scorched Earth their home?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (prologue)

_Run._ She scrambles to her feet and blinks against the wave of vertigo. _Run, you idiot_. Her legs take over and muscle memory kicks into gear and she’s out of the small, humid cell and into the maze of dimly-lit dirt hallways before her brain catches up and wonders what the hell is going on.

 _Keep going_. She turns around and dashes into a side corridor, away from the sound of oncoming voices and boots stomping in frighteningly-even cadence. She stumbles over a rock and presses her hands against the stone wall for support, wishing for her shoes. She panics: left, right or straight? _Think. What do you remember?_ She pushes her back against the cold, uneven stones and tries to be invisible while the guards pass. _Inside. Stairs up. Left, right, right. Straight for a while. Cold, immediate left. Stairs down._ She opens her eyes and dares a glance around the corner – the guards are gone. _Now go!_ She sprints, turning left where her memory says right, up where she remembers down. She passes a gust of cold air, shivering in what scraps of her clothing remain. _You can’t go out the way you came in. Guards. Find another exit._ She curses under her breath and takes a right where she should take a left, frantically searching her brain for architecture and anthropology and what the hell this building looks like and where a door might be.

 _Get off the planet. Find a ship._ She lucks out: hiding in a large crack in the wall from a contingent of four guards sprinting past, she hears the familiar whine of engines to her left. An alarm sounds. _Crack goes through. You can fit._ She shimmies through the wall, following the faint light on the other side, and notices that she really shouldn’t be able to do this. She spares a glance at her body. _Yeah, you’ve been here for three months. There’s not much left of you. Think of cheeseburgers later._ She waits for the hangar bay to empty of the departing squadron. Her fingers fly over the external controls of the closest raider and she jumps inside before the hatch is fully open. She slaps the inside panel and the door drops down. _They know you’re gone. Hurry or they’ll lock down the bay._ She whispers at herself to please shut the hell up and straps herself in as she programs the unfamiliar controls to do what she hopes is turn on and lift off. The bay doors begin to close and she curses and decides that she’ll figure out the finer details of navigation later. She pushes the acceleration to maximum and flies out and into the murky dawn sky.

 _Now up. Space._ She looks over her shoulder and her eyes widen at the sight of the bay doors opening again. Raiders swarm out behind her. A string of curses spills out of her mouth as she searches for the right controls. Something beeps happily, so she presses it again and discovers evasive maneuvers.

 _Cute. But maybe the hyperdrive._ Nodding to herself, she tries a few other buttons and gets lucky. She ignores the garbled radio transmission in an alien language, no doubt telling her to land the raider and come out with her hands raised. She exits the planet’s atmosphere miraculously unscathed by the shots fired by the chasing raiders. As soon as she clears the gravity well, she kicks in the hyperdrive and disappears.

 _Find a planet with a Stargate. Get home._ Her vision begins to blur and she’s suddenly violently sick into the copilot’s bucket seat. She breathes in deeply and exhales loudly, closing her eyes for a moment. Body and mind calmed, she opens her eyes and accesses the ship’s astrometrics computer. She plots a course for the nearest friendly planet she knows to contain a Stargate. She passes the four hours by searching the ship for water (successful) and food (not so much) and trying to stay awake by reciting bits of _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner._

* * *

She remembers leaning on the DHD for support, barely able to stand and even less able to focus her eyes, as she slapped the symbols for Earth out of sheer muscle memory. And she remembers the moment before she stepped into the event horizon hoping that this planet had been left alone and the chance of ending up where she started is exactly zero. But then, nothing.

So when she opens her eyes to cloying semi-darkness, the urge to panic surges forward before her ears register the low, rhythmic beeping of medical monitors. She hears voices shouting and thinks that they might sound familiar, but her brain is fuzzy and she can’t concentrate enough through panic’s narrow field of vision to make the sounds into words and the voices into people. She tries to take a deep breath and calm down, but there’s a tube in her throat and while some part of her mind is screaming that she’s home, the rest of her mind has spent three months in an alien prison learning to reject logical thought and the tube causes another rush of panic. She sits up.

Bad idea.

Pain shoots up her spine and into her skull, blinding white pain that erases any other thoughts from her mind as she grabs at her head. Hot tears escape out of the corners of her eyes as the burning radiates out across her shoulders. She feels someone’s arm cross her body and she gags for a moment but then the tube is gone and she’s coughing, hard. And through the aching in her chest and the thudding pain in her head and the sting of her back, she decides that right now, she’d really like to die.

“You’re safe, Alle,” a male voice whispers in her ear as a warm, strong hand grasps hers.

She knows that voice, remembers it. _Trusts it_ , she realizes, and has trouble defining the term: trust is a feeling only distantly remembered now, but the faint memories are kind and comforting and she clings to them and realizes that trust is good. She focuses on the words he speaks to her, quiet, calming words assuring her of safety and home and she slowly, _slowly_ relaxes. “Zach,” she whispers hoarsely, finally able to match a person with the voice. She tries to tighten her grip on his hand, reassure herself that he’s real, but all she manages is a faint squeeze.

The mattress shifts and she senses a body next to her and an arm carefully slides across her shoulders. “Yeah,” he says, and she feels lips press against her temple and she’s suddenly aware of how quiet the room is. “You’re okay.”

The way her body aches and throbs and burns and the way her mind is curiously refusing to let her remember much of anything all tell her that she is just about as thoroughly far away from _okay_ as she can get and still be alive. But she nods, barely.

“Alle,” another voice, female this time, says quietly from her other side, “can you lie back down? You need to rest.”

She opens her eyes and what had been blurry shapes is now sharply in focus – machines, beds, doorway. People. Infirmary. _Home_. She lifts her head and blinks at the doctor. “What happened to me?” Something nags at the back of her mind and she doesn’t want to sleep until she knows why everything hurts so badly. Panic begins to build up again when she sees the doctor – Kate, she remembers – glance away, uncertain. The arm around her shoulders tightens just slightly, reminding her that it’s okay.

“You’ve been missing for three months.”

She’s unsettled by the uncertainty in her friend’s non-answer and opens her mouth to explain, but closes it again when she realizes she can’t. She rests her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes. Exhaustion washes over her and she’s aware of the bed shifting again and hands slowly guiding her to lie down. Sleep is not instant, though, and she hears troubling words before she finally succumbs to the sedative injected into her IV.

“How is she?”

“She’s awake. It’ll be rough, but she seems to know where she is and who we are, which is good. Any news on Sam and Jack?”

“No. We searched the planet she gated from and everything around it. Didn’t find anything.”

“She wouldn’t leave without them.”

“I know.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part One: The Future Freaks Me Out  
> 

“Well,” Jack announces cheerfully, casually waiting by the Stargate for Daniel to dial home, “that was uneventful.”

The chevrons lock and the wormhole engages and Sam sends through their iris code and thinks about _uneventful_. She’s almost forgotten about the word’s existence over the past years, having never had occasion to use it except in the presence of the word _not_. But P3X-673 truly was _uneventful_. Pretty, yes, with trees and mountains and gorgeous sunsets lighting up the planet’s twin moons in colors Earth never sees. Useful, too, since its naquadah deposits had gone unnoticed by the Goa’uld and are there for the taking and Sam suspects that the squirrel-like creatures they’d seen running around wouldn’t be too upset about that.

But eventful? Not at all.

Daniel goes through first, Teal’c behind him, and Sam follows with Jack covering their rear on the unlikely chance that the planet is going to sprout angry locals who might shake their fists or throw rocks at the four of them. When she encounters the odd feeling of rematerialization a little sooner than she remembered on the trip out and takes two steps before realizing that this is not home, she thinks that maybe uneventful was _not_ a good word to describe the mission.

Neither Teal’c nor Daniel has a good explanation ready for General Hammond when he demands to know where Major Carter and Colonel O’Neill are.

* * *

Jack blinks as he steps out of the wormhole not into the familiar concrete walls deep inside Cheyenne Mountain but instead into a sandblasted landscape scrubbed of all apparent life except for a few lizards glaring at him for interrupting their afternoon nap. “Okay,” he says, drawing out the word. “This is new. Where are Teal’c and Daniel?” He looks around for the two men, even squinting into the event horizon before the wormhole closes, hoping to make out their forms coming toward him. Finding neither, he settles his gaze on Sam and her frown as she dials Earth’s coordinates into the DHD again. He gets out of the way, hopping off of the steps to join her on the dusty ground.

“I don’t know, sir, but I’m redialing Earth and it won’t lock. I think we’re on it.” She frowns, recognizing that the symbols on the DHD in front of her exactly match those on the Russian DHD, which should not be in the middle of a desert.

Jack nods once and kicks a pebble as he looks over the lack of scenery again. He glares at the sun. “Well, unless the gate got moved to the desert while we were gone, this isn’t Earth.” The familiar sound of safeties being removed sends off alarm bells in his mind and he jerks his head around to find the source, weapon locked and loaded in his hand.

“Yes it is,” a man in desert camouflage says, stepping out of his hiding place behind an innocuous rock. He walks toward Jack and Sam with a look that, even behind sunglasses, indicates that he’s sizing up their threat potential. “Who the hell are you?” He pauses a few feet in front of them and tilts his head, as if he already knows the answer to his question.

“Well,” Jack says, noting that they’re surrounded. Despite the number of guns pointed at his head, he keeps a firm hold on his weapon and Sam does the same beside him. “I’m Colonel Jack O’Neill and she’s Major Samantha Carter.”

“Shit,” the man curses. “Thought we were done with this mess.”

“Uhm,” another man speaks up, “Alle did say that this was possible.”

“Don’t care what she said. Still thought we were done with this seeing dead people crap. Though,” he studies Sam and Jack again, “he was a General and she wasn’t military. So, that’s something.”

Sam and Jack share a very confused look. Sam’s shoulders drop. They’d assumed years ago that Stargate malfunctions were impossible. They’d also assumed that, if the impossible malfunction did occur, it would simply spit them out on a different planet. They’d assumed wrong, in a very big way.

Different realities were never even considered.

“Come with us,” he gestures for the newcomers to jump in the back of a truck and they drive towards buildings off in the distance.

* * *

They’re hurried off to the infirmary. Jack objects to having to prove that he is who he says he is, but Sam quietly rolls up her sleeve and allows the nurse to take a few vials of blood. Sam shoots Jack a look, telling him to just shut up and do what he’s told for once. Apart from their greeting party’s initial reaction, nobody’s given any indication that they’re unwelcome or going to be harmed. They’re just unexpected.

Jack watches Sam as a nurse presses a tongue depressor into his mouth and shines a light into his throat. She’s only sitting on the bed across from him, hands clasped in her lap, but he knows that the wheels are working overtime inside her head.

“What year is it?” Sam asks after visibly reaching a conclusion Jack can’t read.

“2034,” the nurse offers easily. “Someone will be by shortly to explain.” She collects the wrappings from the needles and tongue depressors and leaves them with a smile.

Jack opens his mouth to ask what he’s wanted to ask since arriving on this Earth instead of his Earth – _what the hell happened, Carter?_ – but she shakes her head. He silences his question with a frown, figuring that it might be explained soon enough by that “someone,” and watches her stare at her hands. She picks at a string coming off the medical tape stabilizing two fingers on her left hand, jammed when she tripped over a tree root while she was too excited about the naquadah resources to pay attention to the ground. He can’t tell whether her slumped shoulders are because she can’t explain what happened, doesn’t know what happened, her beloved Stargate didn’t work the way she knew it was supposed to work, or because she’s wishing for that chocolate bar in the outside pocket of her pack and doesn’t want to move to get it. It might be a combination of everything, but he doesn’t have a chance to study further because her spine straightens and any expression is wiped from her face when a short, wiry man steps into the infirmary.

“Hi,” he says, and introduces himself as Doctor Simon Boyd, theoretical reality physicist. His job title alone makes Jack’s head hurt. “I suspect that you’re not where you should be.”

Jack looks at him askance. “No. Can we get home?”

Sam closes her eyes and takes a breath, swallowing yet another apology for her CO’s behavior. Since Dr. Boyd doesn’t appear confused about who they are she assumes that he is already aware that Jack doesn’t have much patience for science. He visibly hesitates at Jack’s question so she jumps in. “Dr. Boyd…Simon,” she uses his first name after a smile and a _please, call me Simon_ even though she doesn’t have much intention to do so, “what happened?”

“The Stargate system in our reality is corrupted. Sometimes it puts people where they want to go. Other times they end up in completely the wrong reality and, sometimes, the wrong time.” He ends the statement with a smile, as if it explains everything and is supposed to make them happy.

And then Jack knows that Doctor-Simon-Boyd-theoretical-reality-physicist is going to give him a migraine. Because even though he isn’t paying attention to Boyd’s explanation of events – though he hears snippets, something about a species called the Rak’har and reality jumping – he’s fairly certain that it all adds up to one big _I don’t know_ answer to his question and he really hates that.

“Just hang on,” Jack says, crossly interrupting the very patient scientist. “You’re saying that when we dialed Earth from P3X-673, somehow we switched realities _and_ timelines. Fine. Where the hell are Daniel and Teal’c?”

“Earth,” Boyd says, a little frustrated since he just explained that the gate always goes to the specified planet, but not always the correct one.

“The one they belong on? Or another one?”

“I don’t know. We’ve been working on a way to track individual energy signatures through the Stargate because we’ve lost a lot of our own people that way…but we haven’t been successful. Yet.” His patience is slowly wearing thin; the Jack O’Neill he’s used to dealing with was a little less cranky about things he didn’t understand.

Sam quietly clears her throat from her bed, silent up until now while she listened and processed all of the information. “Clearly you’re more used to reality and time shifting than we are. Do you have a way to get us back?” She repeats Jack’s earlier question.

The scientist swallows and chooses his words carefully. “Maybe. We’re trying to reboot our own timeline so we can avoid this mess, and Alle’s been doing the bulk of the research. She might be able help you more.”

“Who’s Alle?” Sam asks, the scientific part of her brain hoping that whoever she is, Alle doesn’t have the solution quite yet because the whole thing sounds wonderfully complicated and unlike anything Sam’s ever encountered before, or would be likely to encounter again.

“Oh,” Boyd says flatly. “That’s going to be awkward. Maybe you should start with Zach.”

Jack sighs loudly, wanting a damn answer. “Who’s Zach?”

“I am,” a tall young man dressed in military fatigues steps in from the hallway.

Jack tilts his head, trying to figure out why he feels like he’s expected to know the man. “Hi.”

Zach smiles softly, a hint of sadness behind his eyes. “I’m Major Zachary Hawthorne. My fiancée is Alexandra Carter-O’Neill.”

“Ah,” Jack says, pointedly not looking at Sam.

Sam stares at the sheets on the bed beneath her and she smoothes out the wrinkles in the fabric. Her heart aches, though she’s not sure for whom, and she’s suddenly overcome by a desire to curl into a ball and cry. She swallows and pulls herself together and avoids looking at any part of Jack other than his shoes. Dragging her gaze up from the floor, she offers a smile to Zach. “So, this is awkward,” she says with a lopsided grimace, vocalizing the thoughts of everyone in the room. She notices that Boyd has made himself scarce and can’t blame the man for wanting to avoid this.

Zach laughs a little, glad for the relief of the tension, and nods. “Yes.”

Jack comes to his senses a little later than Sam, still unsure what the hell is going on or how he feels about it but able to shelve his confusion for a later time. “What happened here?” He asks in a quiet, commanding tone in hope that the Air Force major in front of him will understand that he wants Big Picture instead of Boyd’s detailed explanation of the past three hours.

He gestures for them to get comfortable on the beds. “About seven years ago,” Zach starts, pulling up a chair to sit in front of Sam and Jack. He turns it around and sits backwards, resting his arms on the back, “a species called the Rak’har showed up. They started out taking over planets and solar systems with small populations. We didn’t know much at first; just that nobody was having much luck fighting them. Then something went wrong with the gate system. A few SG teams disappeared and a couple of times teams stepped through the gate that weren’t ours. We suspended the program and handed it over to the scientists to figure out, but didn’t put two and two together for about a year. And when we finally realized what a problem they really were, it was too late: they had a foothold in the galaxy and have the ability to shift through reality and time. They’d dropped nets across the galaxy to disrupt the phase of anyone who traveled through them. Unfortunately, most of these nets were placed in direct lines of gate wormholes. We had no idea what to do about it. Without actually seeing the technology, the ideas were so abstract and theoretical our people could barely explain how they might start.”

He twists the cap off his water bottle and takes a swig. “Two years later, they came here. They dropped some sort of virus into the atmosphere. It killed you in four days. Some people got lucky, locked themselves in their houses and didn’t come out for weeks, others had natural immunity. Turns out that if your DNA was different enough from the standard human genome, you were immune. Most of us,” he gestures to the SGC patch on his left arm, “survived on account of being exposed to enough alien stuff over the years. They came back and dropped bombs on every major city a week later. We think there are maybe 1,200 people left on the planet, total.”

“Oh my God,” Sam whispers.

Zach nods and taps his water bottle against the back of the chair. “Yeah. Cheyenne Mountain was destroyed. We hooked up the second Stargate here at Area 51 in case anyone was trying to get home. Everyone in our reality knows to avoid gate travel, but we’ve acquired a few unlucky visitors like yourself. We can reset the clock pretty easily, so Sam and Alle and a bunch of other scientists immediately started working on a defense.”

“So,” Jack says, “what happened to us?” He gestures to himself and Carter. She shoots him a meaningful look but he shrugs; he wants to know.

Zach takes a deep breath and looks away for a moment. “Three years ago, Sam and Alle went to the Alpha Site to pick up some equipment. Jack sure as hell wasn’t letting them go alone. They never made it. No one knows what happened – the wormhole to the Alpha Site was clean before then and we made a clean redial immediately afterward, but they didn’t make it. Three months later, Alle came back. They were on a Rak’har prison planet. I have no idea how Alle escaped, but we do know that Sam and Jack died there.”

Sam reaches out and places a comforting hand on his, offering a smile and a slight squeeze before she pulls back. They received the much abbreviated version, though whether it’s because he doesn’t want to share or because that’s all he knows, she isn’t sure. But she’s very sure that she’s glad it’s all he said.

The three of them sit quietly for a few minutes, lost in their own thoughts about family, teammates and home.

“She’s not here right now,” Zach says suddenly. “She went on the Florida trip and they’re due back in a couple of days. And I don’t know what she’s working on, but when she gets back she should be able to tell you whether you’re going home soon or not.”

“Florida?” Jack asks.

“There’s some equipment at Canaveral that they need. Plus it’s orange season.”

“I’m hoping they come back with fish. We could do with some extra protein around here. Hi, I’m Doctor Kate Shackleton.” A petite, brunette woman walks over with a clipboard of lab results and smiles at them. She takes off her glasses before she offers her hand to Sam and Jack. “You are who you say you are.”

“Told you,” Jack says.

Sam can’t hold back a laugh at him. She shakes Dr. Shackleton’s hand and finds that the woman reminds her an awful lot of Janet. It’s instantly sobering: no one’s given them an idea of when she might get home to see her friend.

“I’m on perimeter duty in a couple of minutes,” Zach says, pulling Sam’s attention back to matters at hand. “But you’re gonna be here for a bit. There’s an empty set of quarters if you don’t mind sharing. Dinner’s at eighteen hundred, but the mess is always open. Don’t argue,” he says when Jack opens his mouth to say something about MREs and not wanting to impose. “Food is one thing we have plenty of.”

The unsaid _because there aren’t many of us left to eat it_ hangs above all their heads as Zach directs them to what will become their home for months.

* * *

“It’s amazing,” Sam says, bending over to untie her laces. “The world ended and they’ve still managed electricity, supplies, food, and some sort of infrastructure.”

Jack clears his throat. “Carter. We’re a very long way from home.”

“I know, sir,” she says, toeing off her boots. “But you have to admit, it’s kind of remarkable.” She sets her boots neatly by the door.

“Consider it admitted. How do we get home?”

She shrugs and digs around in her pack for some toothpaste. “I don’t know, sir.” She stands up and sighs, remembering that she has a toothbrush but no toothpaste; she’d borrowed Daniel’s the night before. “I know _when_ we are, but as to what reality we’re in? We don’t have any way of determining which reality is really ours even without the time travel.”

“Carter,” Jack says sharply, noticing the set of her jaw which means that she’s either going to give him an incomprehensible lesson on theoretical physics or sit on the floor and give up if he doesn’t make an abrupt left turn, “can we get home?”

“Well…”

“Ah.” He holds up a hand, stopping her right there. “Yes or no. Can we get home?”

“It’s possible, sir. I just don’t know how long it’s going to take or how we’re going to do it.”

Jack nods, figuring that that’s about as close to a straight answer as he’s going to get from her right now. “Alright.” He reaches into his pack. “Heads up,” he smiles and tosses her his toothpaste. “I’ll take the couch.”

She hesitates by the bathroom door, studying the couch and its potential comfort level. “The bed’s plenty big enough…”

“I’ll take the couch,” he repeats.

Sam smiles; they’ve been working together long enough for her to understand that what he really means is that he isn’t going to sleep tonight and doesn’t want to keep her up. “Thanks.”

* * *

Sam and Jack look up from their breakfast – he was ecstatic to discover that they have Froot Loops until Sam pointed out that the Froot Loops couldn’t possibly still be good, even with all the chemicals, but he glared at her and poured himself a bowl anyway – and stare at the commotion stirring at the front entrance to the mess hall. By the sounds of it, the Florida trip has returned, complete with oranges, seafood, and some complicated-looking equipment covered in NASA stickers. And a tan.

They’ve had three days to speculate on what their (not) daughter might look like. They’re prepared for tall and blonde. They’re prepared for brunette and blue eyes. They’re prepared for scientific and serious. They’re prepared for gloomy and sulky. Hell, they’re even prepared for cold and indifferent.

They are _not_ prepared for a five foot-three inch ball of energy wearing bright pink rain boots. But that is what they get.

“No, Boyd,” she says patiently but with a hint of frustration, as if explaining to a five year-old why it’s a bad idea to stick a fork in an electrical outlet, “I don’t _need_ a graduate student. What I _need_ is a PhD astrophysicist who can calculate divergent quantum reality integrals without getting a migraine. And until you can find me one of those, _you_ can take Jeremy the Graduate Student.”

“I don’t need a grad student either.”

“No, but you didn’t just spend the last three thousand miles listening to a gushing recap of your doctorate complete with an _oh my God, it was amazing_ every five miles. There were hand gestures. And fawning. I think he went starry-eyed on me. Of all the people who managed to survive in Florida, really.”

“You _did_ come up with the slingshot dialing method which rewrote all conventional wisdom on the Stargate.” He puts his hands up in defense when she shoots him a meaningful glare. “I’m just saying. Take credit where it’s due.”

“I don’t like you. And McLaggen put me in charge. Take the grad student.” She smiles widely at him before turning and practically skipping across the room to Zach, standing next to a window looking very happy to see her. “Hello.” She stands on her toes and kisses him softly.

“Hey, you,” he grins, wrapping his arms around her. “How was Florida?”

She sighs and hugs him back. “Sunny. Sandy. Warm. There was a lot of grouper. And rum.”

“Was there now?” Zach smirks and lifts an eyebrow.

“Yeah, Hawthorne? Your fiancée is not allowed on my boat ever again,” a man carrying a crate of oranges shouts across the room at the two of them.

“Hey!” Alle extracts herself from Zach’s embrace and pretends to be offended by the accusation. “I at least stayed _in_ the boat, Troy, unlike some other people.”

Troy puts the crate down and turns to go outside to grab another. “Yes, but you _are_ the only one who fell out of a palm tree. Girl’s dangerous, Z, keep an eye on her.”

“I know, Harper.” Zach tilts his head and looks at his fiancée. “You fell out of a palm tree?”

She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “I needed coconut. My foot slipped.” Zach shakes his head and she laughs. She turns to shout at whoever’s carrying in the equipment to be careful with that but her gaze lands on Sam and Jack mid-swivel and her eyes widen. “Okay, what the _hell_ is _that_?” She turns back to Zach, equipment forgotten, and points at the two of them. “Explanation. Right now.”

Zach grimaces. “Yeah, about that. They came through the gate a few days ago. Their wormhole got caught in a Rak’har shift.”

Alle’s eyes had trailed back to focus on Sam and Jack looking very uncomfortable and out of place. Jack waves awkwardly at her. She knows that something’s not right – the hair’s wrong and the laugh lines are missing and there’s no way in hell her mother would ever wear camouflage – but her brain refuses to process the small differences, settling instead on the faces of her parents. She closes her eyes against the sudden wave of emotion and takes a deep, centering breath to ward off images and feelings she thought she’d boxed up years ago. Zach’s hand on her lower back brings her back to reality and she opens her eyes and looks up at him.

Words are exchanged that Sam and Jack can’t hear, but they read her body language very loudly and very clearly: not good. They look at each other across the table, coffee now forgotten, and grimace.

* * *

“Hey,” Sam says, sliding into a seat across from Alle.

She looks up from her book. “You lost the Rock, Paper, Scissors match about who was going to talk to me?”

Sam winces. “Coin toss, actually.” She notices that Alle’s book is _The Stand_ which she isn’t sure is the best reading material, considering the circumstances.

“Ah.”

Taking a deep breath, Sam jumps in. “I know that this has to be hard for you, and I don’t want to sound selfish, but do you know if we’re getting home soon?”

She nods slowly. “We’re working on it. A lot of people who are here shouldn’t be, it’s not just you two. I don’t know if it’s soon, but you’ll get there.”

Sam nods and tries to keep her relieved smile to a small one. “Hey, if there’s anything…”

“Look,” Alle starts, silencing whatever Sam was going to offer. She folds down the corner of the page, closes her book and sets it aside. “I, uhm,” she pokes at her salad for a moment before she looks up and catches Sam’s eyes, “I know you’re not her, but you look and sound and act a hell of a lot like my mother.” She runs a hand through her choppy hair and the unspoken _and I miss her every day_ hangs in the air between them. “So I need you to just…leave me alone.”

Sam bites her lip and though her first instinct is to get up and give the other woman the hug she so clearly needs, she nods instead. “Okay.” She offers Alle a small smile before she stands up and walks away. She spares a glance over her shoulder and is relieved to see that the table that had been almost empty five minutes ago is now filled with friends, one of whom grabs the book out of Alle’s hand, who immediately go about the business of making her laugh. They’re successful within seconds.

* * *

“What’s so funny?” Sam rubs her eyes, still half asleep as she walks out of the bedroom. She squints at Jack, sitting on the couch chuckling.

He holds up a piece of paper. “And you thought only Twinkies and cockroaches would survive the end of the world.”

She opens her mouth to state that even Twinkies have a shelf life, but recognizes the format of the text as a standard Air Force memo and forces her train of thought to change track. “You’re kidding.” She runs her fingers through her hair and sits next to him.

“Nope. Funny.” He finishes skimming and then hands it to Sam.

She looks at him askance, in complete disbelief that an Air Force memo could even resemble funny – at least intentionally; she’s taped a few from the SGC that were accidentally hilarious to the wall of her lab – and reads:

>   
> 
> 
> **TO:** Everyone who should not be here.  
>  **FROM:** An astrophysicist, a quantum mathematician and a social geographer  
>  **RE:** This is not the beginning of _a walked into a bar_ joke.
> 
> It’s been a while since we’ve last updated the Who Needs to Go Where and When diagram. There’s a giant whiteboard outside Carter-O’Neill’s lab (206) with what we think is the most recent version. If you are in the wrong reality, please make your way down there some time this week (we mean it) and double check that a) you exist on the diagram, b) you exist in the correct spot on the diagram, and c) all the details of where/when you should be are correct (there’s a handy chart taped up there for reference). A lot of caffeine and not a lot of sleep went into making this thing, so don’t erase or change anything that doesn’t directly apply to you.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Alle, Jeff and Stephanie
> 
>  
> 
>  **TO:** All Area 51 residents  
>  **FROM:** Team Awesome  
>  **RE:** Dart Wars v4.0
> 
> Back by popular demand. Sign-up sheets are available in the mess, due to Troy Harper or Kate Shackleton by Friday.
> 
> Bring it. - T&K
> 
>  
> 
>  **TO:** All Area 51 residents  
>  **FROM:** Kitchen staff  
>  **RE:** Step away from the fridge.
> 
> We don’t mean to be territorial here. We like all of you and don’t want any of you to starve. But unless you have kitchen privileges, we need to ask you to stay out of the kitchen. We are _not_ rationing food, but it helps in planning if we know exactly what’s in the kitchen and storage. If you absolutely must have a veggie omelet at three in the morning to fuel your quantum mechanics bender (and we understand that this happens), please find one of us and we’ll hook you up.
> 
> With that said, the breakfast bar is open all day with fruit, snacks, bread, peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes there are cookies. Help yourself.
> 
> Thanks,  
> The folks who are up way before you to make breakfast
> 
> PS: Some of you have requested waffles. We’d love to, but someone borrowed the waffle iron and neglected to return it. So if you have it? Please just drop it off. No questions asked, no fingers pointed.
> 
>  
> 
>  **TO:** Everyone who didn’t go on the Florida trip.  
>  **FROM:** Everyone who did go on the Florida trip.  
>  **RE:** We get it.
> 
> We get it. We really do. What you wanted was a nice, organic, free-range, grain-fed medium-rare steak, a baked potato and some applesauce. And what we brought back was a lot of seafood, more oranges than we’d really like to admit, and a couple of coconuts. So we got the order wrong, and we’re sorry about that, but we _were_ in Florida which isn’t exactly known for its plethora of cattle farms.
> 
> We’re really sorry that the entire base smells like a day-old fish market right now (really, we are: we smell it, too) but fish only lasts on ice for so long. Your friendly kitchen staff has been working overtime to deal with the metric boatload of seafood that you folks won’t be able to consume in two days. Canning, salting, smoking and otherwise preserving can be a stinky process but it’s way better than the alternatives: option one – no fish; option two – rotten fish.
> 
> It’ll be over soon. In the meantime, have an orange.
> 
> \- Area 51’s resident fishmongers
> 
>  
> 
>  **TO:** All head scientists  
>  **FROM:** General McLaggen  
>  **RE:** Meeting
> 
> 1330\. My office.
> 
>  
> 
>  **TO:** Biochemistry  
>  **FROM:** Astrophysics  
>  **RE:** Light bulbs
> 
> We are not amused.
> 
>   
> 

Chuckling, Sam folds up the paper again and hands it back to Jack. “At least they kept their sense of humor.”

“You know,” Jack says, “I’d make sure I got my memos if they were like this.”

She looks at him sideways, mid-yawn. “Sure. _You_ bring up the idea of gutting a fish in the gate room to General Hammond.”

* * *

After setting a note on the coffee table to assuage any panic should Carter wake up before he gets back, Jack slips out of their shared quarters in the hope that a walk will cure his insomnia. He gets lost after five minutes, finding himself near the entrance level instead of the library like he’d intended. Spying a map tacked on the wall, he heads toward it to at least get his bearings.

“Little lost?” Alle’s voice distracts him from his target. She’s smirking.

“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Jack ignores the question and falls in step with Alle, walking toward the door.

She lifts an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you?”

He smiles, point taken, and shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep.” He follows her outside into the clear, crisp Nevada night. Despite its heat during the day, the desert cools off once the sun sets and he’s thankful for the thin long-sleeved shirt he tossed on. “I thought they had rules about going outside in the dark.”

“You’re out here,” she points out.

“Yeah,” he says, gently kicking a stray tumbleweed, “but I’m out here with you and you’re not getting stopped.”

She smirks. “I’ve proven my aptitude for self-preservation; they let me ignore the rules. Besides, if anything more threatening than a coyote shows up, these guys,” she waves at someone perched invisible on the rooftop, “will shoot it down before I even notice it.”

“Ah.” They step beyond the pale glow of the base’s few spotlights and into the dark. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Couldn’t sleep either.”

He notices that she’s still wearing the khaki shorts and black hoodie he’d seen her in at dinner: she hasn’t even tried. “Want to talk about it?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“Nope.”

They walk in silence for several minutes, the air and ground lit up by the brilliant full moon. The Stargate is still miles off, but Jack can make out its unnatural circular form, standing tall against the bright stars. Alle stops and shoves her hands in the pocket of her sweatshirt and turns around, staring up at the sky.

Jack suddenly feels like he’s intruding.

“When I was a kid,” she says softly, still gazing at Orion, “and Dad was offworld, Mom would take me up on our roof and point a telescope at wherever he was. Most of the time we couldn’t actually see the star, but she tried. I think she was breaking about nine security laws by doing it, but she always said that it was better to know where he was than be left wondering.” She pauses and turns a little, facing Cassiopeia now. “I was eleven when she stopped; I guess she figured I was old enough to understand the concept. But I still climbed up onto the roof and checked it out.”

“How’d you know where he was?”

Alle smiles at him. “Being the daughter of the SGC’s top scientist and the commander of SG-1 had its benefits.”

“You read classified reports,” Jack concludes with a smirk.

“I read classified reports,” she nods. She leaves off the part about how she never once had to recalibrate the telescope to find her father; it was always already pointed in the right direction. “I may have been a little mean to Sam at dinner the other night.”

Jack blinks at the topic shift. He’s heard about it, of course, but to hear Carter’s version it was more desperate request than mean. Rather than say so, he gently pushes a little, sensing that she’s trying to say something. “Yeah?”

She lifts an eyebrow and looks at him askance. “Like you haven’t heard.”

“Not too subtle, huh?”

She shakes her head and grins a little. “For a guy trained in black ops, you’re pretty obvious.” Even if it wasn’t inconceivable for her that any version of Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter wouldn’t share information, his slight hesitation when he caught up with her in the hallway gave him away.

“Yet you didn’t give me the brush off.”

She crouches and picks up a rock, tossing it in her palm a few times before reaching back and throwing it as hard as she can into the black desert night. “At some level I always knew it was possible for Dad not to come home after a mission. But Mom was always going to be there.”

Jack can’t, and doesn’t want to, imagine how it must feel for her, losing both parents and suddenly finding herself completely alone; he _can_ imagine the alien prison with no hope of rescue and tries not to think about that too much. “I’m sorry,” he offers quietly, knowing that the condolence isn’t much.

Alle looks at him and smiles sadly. “I just…” she sighs and looks away again, starting over. “When I was seven, some mission went horribly awry. He didn’t get home for a month and a half. And I learned that I could…deal without him. I didn’t want to and I hated it and I missed him like crazy and I was worried but I could live. Because Mom was there. She was a _wreck_ , but she was there.” She bites her lip and kicks a pebble. “I guess you’re never really prepared for it, but I told myself years ago that I could make it if some day he didn’t walk back through the gate. Never occurred to me that Mom wouldn’t.”

He studies her in the moonlight, the silver glow reflecting off her features (Carter’s nose, his jaw line, he notices), casting shadows that make her look years older than she is. He wants to wrap her in a hug and tell her that it will all be okay – and he thinks that might be what she wants, too – but he holds back. She’s carried the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders alone for three years and she’s still standing, he gives her credit for that. A tear escapes her eye and sparkles in the night for the brief moment before she wipes it away with her thumb. Her sweatshirt has thumbholes in the sleeves and it makes him smile.

She turns back to face him. She looks at him hard, as if she’s trying to make out her father in this Jack O’Neill. A slight quirk of his lips and a tilt of his head and he could be about ready to tell her _go inside, Alexandra, nobody ever saved the world on zero sleep_ (even though they both know for a fact that her mother has). But he isn’t. “There’s really nothing between you two,” she says.

Again perplexed by the topic shift, and a little off-balance as he recalls a similar question by a not-his-Sam several years ago, Jack blinks. He shakes his head. “Nope.”

Alle opens her mouth to add to that, but closes it again. She laughs to herself and takes a step back toward the base. “Thanks for the company,” she says over her shoulder, waiting for him.

He nods and offers her a smile before catching up. “You’re welcome.”


	3. Chapter 3

>   
> 
> 
>   
> **TO:** All residents of Area 51  
>  **DATE:** 6/14/34  
>  **FROM:** Farmer Jake and Farmer Kevin  
>  **RE:** Food
> 
> Hi, folks. As we move into July, we’re beginning to hit the height of the vegetable harvest season. Any and all help we could get picking and storing (canning, preserving, etc.) this year’s crop would be greatly appreciated. General McLaggen has once again graciously volunteered to give all scientists a three-month vacation to help us out with this, so claiming physics isn’t going to get you out of it. Besides, you people need to get some sunlight. :)
> 
> If you’re new to this, we’ll teach you everything you need to know. If you’re not new, we’ll give you a refresher anyway.
> 
> Thank you!
> 
>   
> 

Jack plucks a tomato from its stalk and gently places it in the bucket on the ground next to him. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, certain that he’s done nothing to relieve the sweat and instead created mud. He considers himself a fairly simple guy – needing little more than _The Simpsons_ and fishing and a bottle of Guinness to be happy – but after three weeks of vegetable picking, he really just wants to shoot something. His requests to be added to the perimeter duty roster have been denied for reasons that are fuzzy and seem to be dependent on a lot of _if_ s ( _if_ the Rak’har come back and _if_ they show up here and _if_ they see him, he’ll be instantly recognized) and since there’s a limited amount of running and lifting he can do before getting even more bored and because nobody needs to be trained in skills he has, he wakes up every morning, slathers on sunscreen and heads outside to learn about agriculture.

He thinks that this must be what going insane feels like.

Fortunately, he’s not alone. He grins through the leafy plants at Sam working her way down her own row. And he thinks that if he feels like he’s going insane, she must be holding onto the shreds of her sanity by her fingernails. She’s volunteered her help to every scientist she can find, but her offers have been met with a shake of a head and a _we’re all needed outside_ mantra (and Alle is remarkably efficient at avoiding her anyway) so Sam gave up after a week of desperate attempts to be a scientist and joined Jack in the garden. Technically it’s a farm, based on size and the presence of a significant number of chickens and a few tractors and an irrigation network, but they find it easier to say that they’ve been _gardening_ instead of _farming_.

The implication at the end of the day is flowers, not cow manure.

The efforts to maintain some level of normalcy don’t go unnoticed by Sam or Jack, especially once they realize that they have exactly one set of everything – though Sam does have three pairs of socks – and washing that every day isn’t the most pragmatic plan they’ve ever come up with. Jack thinks that it may be the only time in his life that he’s been encouraged to wear shorts on a military base. The military sticks with fatigues and BDUs and solid colors and several shades of khaki, but the civilians and scientists dress as though the world didn’t end but maybe their closets just got a little smaller. Flashes of color that once caught them off guard are now welcome breaks to the bland base walls that surround them inside and never-ending sandy desert outside. There’s a surprising amount of Day-Glo.

They have a routine now, settling into the repetition while they get used to the idea of waiting for someone else to figure out how they’re supposed to get home. Awake at five, Sam quietly brushes her teeth and then nudges Jack’s shoulder before she leaves for a morning run. She wakes him up again when she gets back and then hops in the shower, waking him up for a third time ( _Get up. No really, I mean it now_ ) when she’s wrapped in a towel and retreats to the bedroom to change while he sleepily brushes his teeth and wonders how anyone could be awake enough to run five miles before coffee. She reminds him of oh-six-hundred departure times and how this really isn’t that bad at all in comparison as they walk to the mess for breakfast, and then outside before the Nevada sun gets too much and they retreat inside for lunch.

Afternoons are spent playing chess, sorting produce by size (a necessary aspect of agriculture so mind numbing that Jack is positive it was invented by farmers solely as a method of getting their children out of their hair), or Jack annoying Sam while she tries to read. Dinner, sometimes they sit back and watch a Dart Wars final battle, and then they return to their quarters. Jack whines about being bored, Sam grumbles about a knot in her right shoulder, they smile and say _remember that time Daniel thought the ritual was for rain/good harvest/good hunting/thanks/friendship and it was really for fertility/love/beautiful women/handsome men/marriage and it involved nudity/alcohol/drugs/body paint?_ and Sam heads into the bathroom to brush her teeth and wash the dirt out from under her fingernails while Jack puts the pillows and blankets back on the couch.

She offers to share the bed, but he declines with a smile and says that the couch is more comfortable than it looks (they both know it isn’t) and after he switches off the bathroom light and steps out into the living room in his boxers, he sticks his head into the bedroom to wish Sam sweet dreams. She tells him the same and turns out her light as he shuts the door, but her eyes stay open until the light filtering underneath her door disappears and she hears him settle down into slumber.

Sleep for eight hours, repeat.

He sleeps on the couch because this isn’t a question of _if_ they’ll get back, it’s a question of _when_ they’ll get back and he doesn’t want to deal with the multiplying _now what_ scenarios that would undoubtedly develop if they shared a bed. Because at this point, after only three weeks, they’re hugging and laughing and enjoying each other’s company and she’s dropped the _sir_ (mostly) and he calls her _Sam_ (occasionally) and the flirty touches and looks that develop in the next weeks (glances and soft fingertips on jean-covered thighs that neither shy away from) tell him that sharing a bed might _start_ innocently but would most definitely lead to something quite a bit less so.

* * *

“O’Neill.”

Jack looks up from his green beans and squints into the sun to make out the shape of the person talking to him. He vaguely recognizes the man – Rodgers, Rodriguez, Rocco, whatever – as the one who routinely turns down his requests to do something other than pick vegetables. “Yeah?”

“You and Carter are going into town tomorrow. Briefing’s at the mess in ten.” He walks off.

“Town?” Jack lifts an eyebrow at Sam.

She shrugs.

Town, it turns out, is Las Vegas.

Though the city itself was subject to a direct hit when Earth was attacked, a Costco, a Sam’s Club and a Super Wal-Mart all managed to survive intact. The military spent the first several weeks in frantic reorganization of the stores, transferring all perishable items to the Costco so they’d only need to keep the energy running in one building. Most survivors voluntarily relocated to the base but a few fringe groups remain in the city, requiring military protection around the stores to prevent looting. Troy – who Jack remembers as the guy yelling about his boat and who, Jack finds out, was the current leader of SG-1 when this mess happened and has since been reassigned to Supply Guy – steps onto a table to give a practiced speech about avoiding getting shot.

“Grocery 1 has reported increased zombie activity around the Bellagio and Grocery 2 mentioned something about a new group on 95-South. Yes?” He nods to Jack, who has his hand raised.

“Sorry. Zombies?”

“Living dead. Crazy people who have survived on canned beans and Gatorade for five years and will shoot you on sight because they’ve been living in hell for so long they don’t remember what it’s like to be human.”

“Ah.”

His attention returns to the group. “Hawthorne’s handing out supply assignments. You are responsible for what is on that list and nothing else. Use the buddy system when you are inside the building. You get in, grab your stuff, get back to your truck. Each truck has four people. You leave only when your entire group is back and no truck travels alone. Got it?” A chorus of _yes_ es rumbles through the crowd. “Good. We leave at 0630 tomorrow. Get some sleep; it’ll be a long day.”

* * *

Back in his BDUs and boots, Jack palms the butt of his P-90. He leans casually against the Escalade he was pointed toward by someone with a clipboard and peers out at the parking lot around him. Most of the vehicles in the lot are big, trucks and SUVs and a few Hummers, but scattered amidst the hulk are smaller cars, sensible four-door sedans, hybrids and Smart Cars, all of which might have once prevailed in practicality but no longer see any action. All of the cars people are gathered around have been modified: doors and rear windows torn off for easier shooting, M60s mounted to point out the back window, and Jack’s pretty sure he sees a flamethrower on one. He thinks it’s a bit overkill for people who have been labeled so comically as _zombies_ but then he sees the bullet holes that riddle the bed of the truck next to him.

He checks his watch and finds some comfort in the Air Force being unable to tell time in any reality. He taps his sunglasses and they fall from the top of his head onto the bridge of his nose. It’s early, barely 0700, but the sun is already intense, beating down on his neck. He’d scoffed when Carter offered him sunscreen, but she’d looked at him with a glare eerily akin to Janet’s _you will either drop them willingly or I will find a nurse to tie you down_ look and he’d caved, feeling silly, but he thinks now it was a good plan. Carter bends over to retie her boot.

“How many times are you gonna fix that thing?”

She bites back a sharp sigh and tugs the lace a little tighter. “It’s a new lace.” Satisfied for the moment, she stands up. “Is this much firepower really necessary for a trip to Vegas?” Each person milling around the parking lot is equipped with at least an MP7 and a zat as a sidearm.

Jack shrugs. “Zombies,” he says with a grin.

Sam rolls her eyes behind her sunglasses and frowns at her boot, still not sure that it’s right.

Alle walks past them, clipboard in hand as she discusses with Troy whether they need ten packs of paper towels or fifteen. Her feet clad in combat boots, she’s chopped off a pair of desert BDU pants into shorts and skipped the jacket in favor of a white tank top. A P-90 is slung around her back.

“Now that’s just wrong.”

“It’s hot out,” Sam says, assuming that Jack’s talking about the fact that Alle clearly ignored the dress code memo. She wants to do the same thing, and it’s nowhere near the hottest part of the day.

“I mean the gun. She’s a civilian.” He clenches his teeth against the idea of any child of his carrying a weapon, regardless of the circumstances and whether or not he actually had a role in her creation.

Sam turns to look at him. “We give Daniel a gun.”

“That’s different.”

She cocks an eyebrow as she looks at him over the rim of her sunglasses. “How?”

“It just is.”

“Right.” She pushes her sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose and leans against the car.

After a few seconds, Jack throws up his hands. “I’m just saying…”

“She could probably kill you,” Sam offers with a playful grin. “Sir,” she tacks on as an afterthought.

“You mock me?”

“Oh, look, we’re getting ready to go.”

Jack follows her line of sight and focuses on a group of people who look like they’re in charge nodding and waving. Alle pulls a ball cap onto her head (he’s secretly pleased that it’s a Cubs hat) and then grasps the exposed frame of a Jeep and swings herself into the reversed back seat, settling the gun in her lap. She nods again to Troy and the group checks their radios.

“Alright, people. Let’s move out!” Troy shouts and jogs back to the Escalade where Sam, Jack and a young captain named Andrews are waiting. “Who’s riding shotgun?”

The other three look at each other and shrug and play a round of Rock, Paper, Scissors, which lands Sam in the shotgun seat. She climbs in and smiles to herself, thinking that _shotgun_ might actually mean something on this trip.

Half an hour into the ninety-minute drive to the city, Sam notices the first physical evidence that anything bad happened here. A pickup truck lies on its side in the right-hand lane ahead of them and as they pass, she glimpses one skeleton inside and another halfway out, looking like whoever it used to be tried to crawl out before they died. She grimaces.

“It gets worse,” Troy says to her from the driver’s seat without taking his eyes off the road. “Wouldn’t recommend looking.” He turns on the SUV’s CD player and cranks up the volume so the sounds of Quiet Riot can be heard over the roar of the air as they speed across the highway.

And it does get worse. Cars smashed into each other in multi-car pileups bear the scorch marks of fire, bones of their occupants blackened inside. Vehicles remain parked in lanes where drivers and passengers got out to walk, choosing to abandon their ride and tempt the elements but scattered skeletons along the shoulder tell of their inevitable death. Occasionally a skull or a rib or a foot lays nowhere near the rest of a body, hints of coyotes and scavengers. There’s been some attempt at cleaning it up over the past five years, but mostly in moving the mangled metal frames to the left lane to allow for easier travel.

By the time they reach the outskirts of Las Vegas, Sam feels like she wants to throw up and it has nothing to do with the heat or the bumpy ride. Jack places his hand on her shoulder and tries to connect with her eyes through their sunglasses; she’s not alone in the feeling.

The city itself is a disaster. Someone had tried to clean up by making stacks of bodies, now completely decomposed into eerie piles of bones on street corners, but had given up or died in the process. Some still have clothes on and one survivor with a macabre sense of humor posed two skeletons next to each other on a bench, one with its arm around the other making a thumbs up sign. There’s a fedora jauntily set on its head and a tattered pink feather boa wrapped around the neck of its companion.

They pass casinos and hotels, destroyed by bombs and weapons no one expected. The Eiffel Tower lies in parts on its side and the Stratosphere cuts buildings in half where it smashed to the ground.

“Eyes open,” Troy says, turning off the music. “Bellagio’s up ahead on the left. Shoot to kill; these guys aren’t really living anymore.”

The fountains are still and Sam lifts her gun and aims as she thinks she sees movement out of the corner of her eye. The water stinks of stagnancy, but she knows the stench is nowhere near what it must have been years ago with an entire city of decomposing bodies.

Jack returns a volley of machine gun fire in the general direction of a shotgun blast. The shots echo across the empty streets and then there’s silence until they pull up at the Costco with the rest of the caravan.

It takes them ten minutes to run through the store and pick up bags of frozen fruit, three jars of mayonnaise, two thirty-six packs of toilet paper and a giant box of Tootsie Roll pops. They meet back up at the Escalade and load in their “purchases” with the others: paper towels, cashews, chocolate chips, vitamins and truly the biggest bags of frozen peas Jack has ever seen. Once another car is ready to go, Troy signals for them to get back in and he guides the Escalade back onto the road and speeds out of town. Tom Petty serenades them on the way back.

“You okay?” Jack asks Sam later that night once they’ve eaten dinner and showered.

She shakes her head and rubs her arms. Sitting down on the couch, she curls herself into a corner and tucks her knees to her chin. “I’ve seen all the disaster movies. But…” she trails off and shakes her head, unable to voice the feelings. This isn’t her reality, which makes it feel worse even though it should be comforting. In thirty years, it could be hers.

“C’mere,” he says, scooting closer to her. He tucks his arm around her and she immediately leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder. They sit in silence, her eyes closed and his staring at the wall, until he brushes a kiss against the top of her head. “We’re gonna get home,” he says quietly, knowing her unspoken fear because it’s his as well.

“How do you know?” She asks in a small voice, never less sure of anything.

He smiles. “Because you’re the smartest person I know. And some version of you gave birth to someone who seems to have inherited more of your genes than mine. We’ll get home.”

* * *

Two weeks later, Sam’s afternoon ritual (a ritual that began three days ago when Jack ordered her to stay inside after she acquired a fairly worrying sunburn) of being lazy and reading a book is interrupted by a knock. She opens the door, shocked to see Alle standing on the other side.

“Hey,” Sam says, trying to mask her surprise at seeing someone who has been so successful at avoiding her for three months voluntarily standing just outside her quarters.

“Uhm, do you and Jack want to come over for dinner? I mean, the mess does a good job, but sometimes you want to feel like you don’t live on a military base, you know?” Alle plays with her hands as she babbles and explains that she and Zach snagged a set of quarters with a kitchen.

Sam smiles, understanding the feeling even if she doesn’t understand the sudden change in heart. “Sure,” she accepts. “What time?”

“Seven. See you then.” Alle turns and disappears again after offering an awkward wave.

Dinner passes by in a whirl of wonderful food, vegetarian fajitas with tortillas that seem hell bent on ripping and causing no end of laughter when guacamole and salsa drip onto hands and plates. Sam figures that at least one of their alternate reality selves was an amazing cook or it’s a skill Alle picked up elsewhere; Sam can barely chop broccoli when she’s not making soufflé and she knows that Jack can grill a steak but wouldn’t know what to do with a potato if it told him. The company’s surprisingly good, too, with Zach and Alle sharing offworld stories, tales of post-apocalyptic pranks and the one time they road tripped to Minnesota to raid the Mall of America and came back with a car piled to the brim with Legos, the weirdest varieties of peanut butter they could find, Lake Wobegon t-shirts, a giant stuffed Trix rabbit and seven pairs of roller skates. Sam and Jack, in turn, share stories of their SG-1, endless card games around campfires, mistranslated declarations by town leaders that resulted in accidental drunken nudity, the one time Sam ate something she shouldn’t have and turned blue for a week, and a very memorable incident in which Daniel was summarily tossed in jail for wearing glasses.

Sam nudges Jack’s leg with hers under the table when she notices Alle begin to retreat. Jack nods, silently agreeing with Sam that their presence might become too much in ten minutes. Sam offers to clean up.

Alle meets her in the kitchen a few minutes later, a notebook clutched in her hand. She nervously shifts her weight from foot to foot while Sam finishes scrubbing a pan. Sam doesn’t say anything, merely dries her hands and waits for the other woman to speak. The silence in the kitchen is broken only by the men in the next room chatting as they pile dishes and clear the table.

“I feel like I’m eight,” Alle starts, laughing a little, remembering times past when she anxiously asked her mother to check her homework, “but I think my math is wrong somewhere. And I’ve been staring at it for days and can’t find it and you’re the only one besides Boyd who comes close to having a clue what any of this means and he drives me insane. Can you take a look at it?”

Sam nods and accepts the offered well-worn notebook. She may be thirty years behind on the math, but she knows how to error check and catch up fast. “Sure.” As Alle nods her thanks and turns to go, probably to vanish, Sam speaks up. “Thanks for dinner. It was nice.”

Alle looks over her shoulder and smiles a hint of a smile that Sam recognizes, even in its smallest form, as hers. “Cooking dinner makes it seem a little less like the world ended,” she says quietly, pausing a moment before continuing her exit.

* * *

Jack wakes up, thirsty, and furrows his eyebrows when he glances over at the bedroom door and sees light glowing around the doorframe. He drains a glass of water before padding barefoot over the mismatching rugs tossed over the cold floor, transitioning from neon cartoon fish to muted brown and green flowers to bright purple shag without a second thought. He knocks softly before grasping the knob and pushing the door open.

Sam sniffs, barely awake, and stretches her long legs underneath the warm covers. She rubs at her eyes, smiles at Jack, and returns her focus to the carefully-printed equations and diagrams in front of her. The detail amazes her: annotated explanations crowd the margins exactly where she’d be stumped on the logical jump without them.

“Uh uh,” Jack shakes his head and sits on the bed next to her, wishing he could forget the sudden knowledge that the bed is way more comfortable than the couch. He plucks the pencil from her fingers and slides the notebook with all of its theories and math and hope for the future away from her pillow. “No more homework,” he teases when she protests him putting the notebook on the nightstand. “Bedtime.”

Sam covers a yawn, suddenly aware of how exhausted she is and that she’s been awake for twenty hours straight. “Okay,” she mumbles, her eyes fluttering closed as her head drifts back down to the pillow.

Jack smiles and brushes a stray lock of hair out of her face. “Night, Carter,” he whispers, reaching over her to turn off the light.

* * *

Despite the inconsistent numbering system, Alle’s lab isn’t hard to find once someone points Sam to the correct level. Sam follows the dull thudding until it becomes louder, transforming into a discernible beat and then into some fairly vile hip-hop lyrics blasting out of an open door at the end of a hallway. Alle is bent over her desk with her back to the door, her head bouncing in time with the music. Sam knocks loudly, surprised when Alle looks over her shoulder and turns the volume down and gestures for Sam to come in; she’s impressed that anyone could hear anything less than a grenade explosion with the speakers up that loudly.

“Did you find it?”

Sam nods and offers her the notebook, open to the page with the ħ outside the parentheses instead of inside. She smiles when Alle curses under her breath at the small mistake that caused pages of inexplicable predicted results and waits patiently while she rapidly changes all of the affected equation lines.

“Thank you,” Alle says, looking up once she’s finished. “This makes a lot more sense now.”

Sam smiles at her. “You’re welcome. Do you need any help? Pulling weeds is really boring and Jack’s benched me anyway because of the sunburn.” The offer rushes out of her mouth before she has a chance to recall Alle’s earlier request: she’s used to people automatically asking for her scientific help and this is the first time she can remember that she’s had to offer.

Alle rubs at her eyes. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I haven’t slept in a while.” She waits for Sam’s nod of understanding before she continues. “You’re thirty years behind on this stuff. I wrote my dissertation based on breaking laws of physics that you still consider unbreakable. I can _not_ take a week off to get you up to speed.”

Sam swallows her pride and gets it. She gets why she’s been stuck honing her agricultural skills instead of invited four levels underground to assist in the effort to undo catastrophe. She gets it because she’s been in Alle’s exact position more times than she’d like. She gets the unbearable stress that comes with everyone depending on you to save the world and how that leads to mountains of empty soda cans and crumpled coffee cups and very little sleep and a level of crankiness not usually found in nature. And she understands the conflicted frustration that comes from needing one more pair of hands but not wanting to stop to train that pair of hands. However, she knows that while she might not be the smartest person in the room right now, she’s really damn close and really damn close is better than nothing. “Can you take one day off to get me up to speed on the basics I don’t know? I’ll pick up the rest as I need it.”

Alle squints and tilts her head, examining the woman in front of her. There’s a lot she’ll have to explain, but if this Sam Carter is anything like her mother Samantha Carter, she’ll only need it explained to her once and she’ll be able to apply it immediately. “Alright. Meet me for breakfast at 7:30 tomorrow. We’ll start then.”

* * *

At the sound of the door closing and a body slumping against it, Jack looks up from his collapsed house of cards. “You okay, Carter?” He hasn’t seen her since early that morning except for a brief wave at dinner, where she unsuccessfully tried to eat pasta and take notes at the same time.

She opens one eye. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

She opens the other eye and reaches down to touch the floor, stretching out muscles stiff from hours of an uncomfortable chair and frantic note-taking. “For every time I tried to explain something way over your head. I am really sorry.” The part of her that isn’t a scientist and doesn’t understand that condescension comes with sleep deprivation wants to curl up in a ball and cry and go back to pulling carrots.

Jack stands and walks over to her. He places one hand on her shoulder, mindful of the sunburn hidden beneath the t-shirt, and gently guides her into a hug. They’re now three months in and it occurs to him that he hasn’t witnessed her showing even the smallest amount of panic, desperation, worry or homesickness. That concerns him: he’s at least mentioned that he misses annoying Daniel and that he hopes Teal’c has managed to find someone else to introduce him to the finer ways that humans entertain themselves (though he really doesn’t hope; he desperately wants the dubious honor of explaining Mexican midget wrestling to the Jaffa). He presses his lips to the top of her head. “It’s okay.”

Sam rests her head on his shoulder and slowly brings her arms around his waist. She shakes her head. “No, it’s not. They’ve had seven years to figure out how to get people like you and me home and they have no idea.” She feels the emotion rise up inside her but she can’t quite find the energy to care and shove it back down again. “I want to go home and they’ve had _years_ to work on it and I don’t even know what _math_ they’re using. I don’t even know where to start.” She’s aware that she sounds whiny and petulant and a little bit hysterical but as the first hot tears fall onto her cheeks, she gives in.

Jack feels her shudder against him and he holds her tighter as she starts to cry; he’s not entirely sure what to do with a crying Carter ( _Sam_ ), but he rubs slow circles on her back and she sort of melts into him. He sticks with the circles, occasionally murmuring what he hopes are calming, confidence-restoring words, until her breathing steadies.

She sniffles a few times before working up the courage to pull away from his chest. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her cheeks dry with the back of her hand.

Jack looks at his shoulder and the noticeable wet spot on the green fabric of his shirt. He shrugs. “It’ll dry.” He knows that’s not what she’s apologizing for.

Sam looks up at him and manages a watery smile. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll be on the couch,” he says, letting her know that he’s there if she wakes up in the middle of the night needing another hug.

Teeth brushed and face washed and pajamas on, Sam hesitates by the bedroom door. She bites her lip and plays with the hem of her shirt. “Jack,” she says in the general direction of the couch. His first name still sounds foreign to her and she isn’t quite sure how to ask him to come to bed without it sounding like the proposition it isn’t.

He sits up. “Want company?”

She swallows and nods. “Do you mind?”

He stands up and shoots her a look – he wouldn’t have offered otherwise – before following her into the bedroom. He waits patiently for her to get settled, curling into the blankets just the way she likes, before sliding in next to her. She turns out the light and rolls over, tucking her head underneath his chin. He closes his eyes and he can almost pretend that this is any number of ice cold planets and they’re hiding out in a cave somewhere trying not to freeze to death. But she shifts against him and he instinctively slips an arm around her back and he remembers that they aren’t in a cave, they’re in a bed and that hypothermia is not imminent.

But maybe it’s another form of survival.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part Two: If The Stars Were Mine  
> 

Sitting in Alle’s lab, Sam takes a break from working out a reality equation (that there are _equations_ for these things still boggles her mind) and stretches her neck. Her eyes settle on Alle on the other side of the room, bent over a table intently building a model out of Legos. Dressed in black leggings, yellow rain boots and a strappy sapphire blue sundress, Alle would look completely out of place in any lab Sam ever called her own but manages to fit right in here.

Sam, however, feels like she missed a memo somewhere. Her standard-issue jeans and t-shirt combination isn’t nearly enough to blend in with the eclectic clutter scattered around the lab, even if her t-shirt today is advertising Ed’s Feed and Seed in McCool Junction, Nebraska. Two entire shelves of the bookcase are occupied by apocalyptic and time-travel fiction (highlighted, notated and tabbed during a four-day espresso bender in which Alle attempted to make life imitate art). Stuck next to a Darth Vader Mr. Potato Head is a neon green Post-It with phone numbers of long-dead friends and relatives, as if the key to the entire problem will lie within her dentist’s fax number. Near the coffee pot, where most people would keep a jar for loose change, stands an empty bottle of hand sanitizer with “Today is NOT a good day to die” scrawled on the side.

But most of all, Sam feels out of her element because she feels like a complete idiot. She likes to classify herself as _moderately intelligent_ when in the company of fellow physicists, but after two days of doing nothing but asking questions and needing clarification, she downgraded herself to _having potential_ and was grateful when Alle handed her a stack of textbooks and mouthed “homework” to her at the end of the day. She devoured the material (and did her best to ignore Jack’s efforts to distract her) and showed up the next Monday fully aware that she had been demoted to _lab assistant_ until she got her feet under her. It’s only in the past two weeks that Alle has upgraded her to a full-bird scientist, and did so with mock ceremony, presenting Sam with her very own lab coat, her name neatly printed on the lapel in pink Sharpie.

She is, at least, starting to not hate the hip-hop that always filters out from a pair of speakers hidden somewhere amongst the clutter. Either she’s certifiably insane or it means that she’s getting used to how screwed up this reality is, with its district attorneys serving scrambled eggs and coffee shop baristas walking perimeter boundaries. She’s not sure which she’d prefer, but she has a sneaking suspicion that the volume control is turned down for her sake.

“You busy tomorrow night?” Alle asks from somewhere on the floor, crawling on her knees to find an orange lightsaber piece that had the audacity to roll off of her desk. She misjudges the width of her desk and curses when she bangs her head on it. She glares at the offending furniture as she stands up, missing piece in hand, as if that’s going to prevent it from happening again.

Sam blinks. “No. Why?”

“Good,” Alle says, making a face as she snaps the piece into place, “a couple of us have had it with the saving the world thing and intend to forget about it for a bit. You in?”

* * *

A little bit after nine, Sam makes her way down to Alle’s lab. She’s not sure what a Forget About Saving the World Night entails, but she suspects that there’s a certain amount of alcohol involved and more than a few jokes beginning with _a room-temperature superconductor walks into a bar_. Jack had teased her on her way out, demanding that she be home by two or else there would be trouble, but she’d laughed and told him not to wait up.

She overhears the tail end of the _Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar_ joke ( _and doesn’t_ ) as she walks in and laughs with the rest of the group because no matter how many times she’s heard it, that one never gets old. Several of the scientists wave excitedly at her and invite her to help herself to the booze on the table. She pours herself a beaker of something bright blue from an Erlenmeyer flask and decides that she’s better off not asking what’s in it. She finds a seat on the floor and figures that despite its smooth taste the drink is going to give her one hell of a headache in the morning.

The conversation moves off of science jokes they’ve all heard and to things they’d like humanity to remember. Sam suspects this is a topic these four walls have heard much of over the past years, but that the list has gotten increasingly ridiculous (and there is a list – one of the engineers produces a waterlogged notebook from her back pocket and ceremoniously clicks a pen as if to say _you can start now_ ) as they ran out of things like _indoor plumbing_ and _vaccines_.

There’s an entire collective of civilians dedicated to preserving humanity should their efforts fail. But Sam understands this need, the need to shout out the little things that made life a bit better, to remember the things that the anthropologists and archaeologists and sociologists and teachers that work on Level 3 would otherwise forget.

“Lady GaGa.”

“Oh my God. ‘Bad Romance’ got me through o-chem.”

A chorus of _me too_ s goes around the room and Sam doesn’t have a clue who they’re talking about. She stays silent on the matter, figuring that saying something about Joan Jett and the Heartbreakers would date her more than she’s willing to admit.

“LOLCats.”

“I can see Russia from my house!”

“IKEA.”

“You know what word needs to stick around?” Alle speaks up from the corner, swirling the amber liquid in her glass before finishing it in one graceful sip. “Cocksucker.”

Sam blinks at the vulgarity but realizes that she’s heard it quite a bit over the past few days, usually in a string of nonsensical curses, and that if she were in charge of altering the timeline of an entire galaxy, she’d resort to wanting to preserve profanity too.

“Muggle.”

“I solemnly swear I am up to no good.”

“Bootylicious.”

“Actually, I think we could do without that one.”

“Staple removers.”

“What, why?”

“They’re handy!”

“Lost!”

“Oh, fuck, _that show_.”

“Don’t start, Kate.”

“But!”

“ _No_.”

“Zombie movies.”

“Frak.”

“Sonic screwdrivers!”

“Iron Chef!”

The list goes on and every so often a topic will come up that deserves further discussion, discussion which gets increasingly sillier as the contents of the alcohol bottles decreases. People begin to filter out around midnight, citing early mornings or expectant partners and by one, it’s only Sam and Alle.

Alle’s managed to slide off of her chair and lie on the floor, her bottle of K’Taaran Fire Whiskey that had started the evening mostly full now sits entirely empty next to her. Her head is somewhere near Sam’s and there’s a light shining right in their eyes but neither one of them wants to put up the fight with gravity and turn it off.

“How long have you and Zach been together?” It takes Sam a couple tries to get the words in the right order.

“Uhm,” Alle starts and fiddles with her engagement ring as if that’s going to help her remember. “Eight? Ten years? Something like that.”

“Wow,” Sam says.

Alle shrugs as best she can. “Five of those were in this mess.” She gestures aimlessly and knocks the bottle over. “Damn,” she giggles and it takes her six tries to set it upright again, which causes Sam to start laughing, too. “Asked me to marry him and eight months later…boom,” she pantomimes an explosion, careful to avoid the bottle this time. “World ended.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Things happen.” Alle blows past it. “I made him promise that if I fix this, we’re goin’ to Hawaii.”

Sam chuckles at that and imagines all of the future conversations or arguments that could be ended with just that phrase. _I saved the world; you can take out the trash this time._ That neither Zach nor Alle will remember the promise doesn’t seem to matter.

“What ‘bout you and Jack? When did that happen?”

Sam blushes. “What? Hasn’t.” And it hasn’t. Sam knows that she’s probably lying to herself, but she’s been calling their hugs and forehead kisses and the few nights they’ve shared a bed _coping_ and _comfort_ because they’ve been displaced in reality and time and they need a little bit of that.

Alle turns her head, resting her cheek on the concrete floor to look straight at Sam. “Please,” she says, a moment of sobriety coming through, “I watched my mother look at my father for thirty-two years the exact way you look at him. Don’t tell me nothing’s going on.”

“S’not,” Sam slurs, giving in to the unconsciousness tugging at the corners of her mind.

She wakes up in her own bed with a pounding headache and a strong desire to stay horizontal. But the smell of coffee drags her upright.

“Morning, sunshine,” Jack smirks when Sam shuffles bleary-eyed into the main room of their quarters.

She stops in the middle of the room and runs a hand through her hair. The motion doesn’t do much to tame the wild bedhead. “How did I get here?” The last thing she remembers is lying on the floor in Alle’s lab, discussing Hawaii and how this thing between Sam and Jack is most definitely not a thing.

He pours her a cup of coffee and offers her some aspirin. “When you weren’t back around three, I went looking for you.”

She falls into the chair across from him and dry swallows the aspirin. “Thank you.”

* * *

Jack’s intention was to go to the mess to pick up a piece of fruit, but the unmistakable smell of something freshly baked distracts him and he opens the door to the main kitchen to find the source. He follows the sound of clattering baking sheets until he finds Alle in the midst of a heart attack-inducing balancing act, taking a tray of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven with one hand, replacing the tray with a second batch with the other and using her foot to kick the door closed. It’s only when the warm cookies are safely resting on the stove top and being transferred to a cooling rack that he breathes. Blinking, he notices the scars on her upper back that her tank top does nothing to hide. “Ouch,” he says, unable to mask his shock.

Alle jumps, startled, but doesn’t break the stubborn cookie that won’t unstick from the sheet, only smushes it against the side. “What?” She looks over her shoulder at Jack and realizes what she’s wearing. “Oh, yeah. Usually forget about those.” She grasps the hot baking sheet with a potholder and waves the metal tray in the air to cool it down before balling the remaining dough on it.

“What happened?” He knows that what happened in this reality before he showed up is absolutely none of his business but as the owner of several impressive scars of his own, he likes to know the stories behind those of others.

She shrugs and places her palm on the center of the tray to test the temperature. Satisfied, she reaches into the mixing bowl and begins rolling the dough into balls. “Misadventure fermenting alcohol when I was fifteen.” She smirks. “Wash your hands and help me out with this.”

Jack raises an eyebrow as he turns to the sink. “That must’ve gone over well.”

Laughing, Alle shakes her head. “It blew up and threw me out of the attic window. I think Dad was impressed with the concept, but Mom lectured me all the way to the hospital.”

He runs his hands under hot water and tries to be upset with a hypothetical fifteen year-old child of his distilling alcohol in the attic and causing an explosion. He can’t and finds himself agreeing with his alternate self, though he’s sure that there was a safety lecture buried underneath the amusement. “What’s with the baking?” He picks out some dough and does his best to mimic the size of those she’s already placed onto the tray.

Alle sighs softly. “Sam’s birthday is tomorrow.” She gestures with her elbow in the general direction of a cake sitting on the counter waiting to be frosted. “And I cook things when I get stuck. Usually it only takes one dish to get unstuck, but I’m still lost after the cake. So, cookies.”

Jack sneaks a bit of cookie dough after watching Alle do the same. He hadn’t put much thought into Sam’s birthday besides noticing that it was coming up. He usually gets her a card and something small, a plant she can talk to or a book in hope that she’ll take the hint and relax a little; last year he gave her a box of Legos that she quickly turned into a model naquadah reactor. Since they’re lacking in the gift department, he’s hoping that a hug and a happy birthday will do for this year. “You’re making Sam a cake?”

“Yeah,” Alle says, biting her lip. She rearranges a few of the cookie dough balls so they won’t run into each other when they flatten out. She sighs again and turns to face him, bracing her arms on the counter behind her. “The only way we haven’t all killed each other yet is by trying to pretend that the universe isn’t a complete clusterfuck. And life needs to go on. Life has to go on because if we can’t undo the apocalypse, this is what we’re stuck with. And no one should have to forgo birthdays because we couldn’t figure out how to fix it.”

“So Sam gets cake.”

She nods. “Sam gets cake.”

* * *

Sam first notices the vibration when her pen falls off the table. She frowns and puts down her fork, leftover piece of birthday cake forgotten as she reaches down to the floor to pick up her pen. The vibration is faint and she’s almost ready to write it off as a test explosion whose warning memo she missed but as she sits up again, she catches Alle’s worried look. The intensity grows and the Darth Vader Mr. Potato Head crashes to the floor just before a high-pitched whine cuts through the rumbling.

“Not good,” Alle says, her eyes locking with Sam’s. She jumps up, knocking her stool over, and sprints out of the lab, Sam close on her heels.

Sam picks up fragments of conversation as she and Alle rush to the surface, pushing against a sea of people who all seem intent on getting as far underground as possible, and pieces together that the Rak’har are back and there was no warning. Alle’s _not good_ seems like an understatement when paired with the sheer panic around them.

They finally break free of the crowd and step outside. As Sam squints and shades her eyes to look at the sky, she gets the feeling that maybe they were heading in the wrong direction. She vaguely registers the commanding shouts of the military as they scramble for surface-to-air missiles and what few nuclear rockets they have left. The ship hovers in the atmosphere, hulking and awkward. It’s unmistakably a warship, though it’s bulky where it should be sleek, shimmering as if its cloak is malfunctioning.

Sam tilts her head, studying, aware that she should be doing something more useful than standing around and looking at it, but she can’t tear her eyes away or force her feet to move. After a few seconds, she realizes that it isn’t a cloaking system but the ship phasing in and out of their reality and time coordinates. She shudders, thinking that there are countless others out there – perhaps even herself – seeing the exact same image, feeling the exact same fear. The warship looms heavily above her and she feels targeted, like someone up there is looking for her. She doesn’t want to, but her mind duplicates the ship, mentally creating a picture of multiple warships darkening the sky, the sight seen by everyone on this Earth on that fateful day five years ago. She shivers.

“Carter!”

Jack’s voice breaks her gaze and she whips her head around to find him.

“Feel like helping?” He grins, but the tension in his voice gives away his thoughts that this situation is in absolutely no way funny.

“Yes, sir!” She says, reverting back into combat soldier mode, and runs to his side to assist the setup of a grenade launcher. He hands her a radio and an earpiece and she turns it on, catching the middle of an order for all pilots to get their asses in the air _right fucking now_.

A wide red beam shoots out from the underbelly of the ship and begins moving slowly across the ground.

 _“All birds, weapons free. Air assault only. Repeat, air assault only. Take out that scanner.”_

Sam watches in dismay as the scanning beam moves closer and none of the fighter jets’ weapons seems to even hit the ship.

 _“Peace out, kids. If you don’t take this bitch down, I’m gonna come back and haunt all of you.”_

 _“Cowboy, what in the hell are you doing?”_

 _“Taking out the scanner, sir. Just like you said.”_

Sam holds her breath and tracks the plane across the sky as the pilot breaks formation and flies far enough away to pick up the speed required to blow up on impact.

 _“Aw, hell. Everyone else, out of his way. If this doesn’t work, Cowboy, I will kill you myself.”_

 _“I hear you, General. Been an honor, folks.”_

The collision isn’t much, the small fighter jet is no match for the behemoth warship, but the beam disappears. Sam and Jack catch each other’s gaze. Sam wants to cry. Jack wants to put a really big hole in the ship.

 _“Come on home, birds. It’s gonna get messy out there. Ground team, weapons hot. You heard Cowboy, and we are not going to spend eternity unable to find our car keys.”_

The ground shakes on impact as the ship begins to fire at the surface, evidently deciding that the sudden malfunction of its scanner indicated human life.

 _“Ground team, weapons free. Repeat, weapons free. Bring it down.”_

Sam engages the launcher and nods to Jack who fires it into the air. She isn’t sure that any of their weapons will do a damn bit of good, since it took a direct collision to take out the scanner, but they don’t have much of a choice.

 _“Einstein, any time you got a solution for us, it’d be appreciated.”_

 _“Roger that, General. Give me a few minutes.”_

 _“Now, please.”_

 _“Well, if you’d stop bugging me…”_

 _“Got it.”_

Sam can’t stifle the laugh that bubbles out of her when she overhears the conversation between Alle and General McLaggen. She spares a glance at Jack and grins: he’s laughing too, despite the firefight around them. It’s an exchange they both know well.

 _“Got it, General. Everyone hold your fire!”_

Jack mouths what the hell at Sam and Sam shrugs; without a pen and some paper and a clue what Alle’s thought process is, she has no idea what’s planned.

An eternity passes in eight seconds.

 _“Fire!”_

The warship breaks apart and crashes to the ground.

* * *

Jack thinks that if he ever survives the end of his own world only to have that survival threatened a second time, he’d probably want to get ragingly drunk, too. He’s not sure about the wisdom of the inebriated target practice going on outside, but since they seem to be mostly hitting the bull’s eyes that have been painted sloppily on a large broken piece of hull, he lets it go.

They each grab a beer – whatever’s in the garbage can in the back that people are dipping their cups into smells like it would be more useful greasing engines – and stand in line for food. Jack’s eyebrows skyrocket when he sees that there’s actually meat involved and wonders aloud whether they need to do a dance of some sort. The chef smirks at him and says that it’s a special occasion: the cows understand.

If he hadn’t spent the past six months with these people, Jack would’ve been perplexed at the presence of DJ equipment in the corner. But he’s learned that not only are they incredibly resourceful, they’re also really into forgetting that all hell broke loose on their planet. The music is innocuous and appropriate for dinner, the station currently manned by someone’s iPod on shuffle, but he knows that in an hour or two it’ll be loud and thumping.

“Apparently there’s cake,” Sam says. She steals a cherry tomato from Jack’s plate, knowing he won’t eat it.

“There’s cake? How is there cake?” Jack shakes his head in amazement. It’s only been a few hours since the warship was shot down – during which there have been debriefings, announcements and a memorial service – and though his baking skills are limited to eating, he knows that the process of cake can take a while, especially if there’s icing.

Sam shrugs and pops the tomato in her mouth. “There’s cake.”

They don’t stay long. They each finish a couple more beers and a piece of cake (Sam pretends not to notice when Jack goes back for seconds) and leave before the music gets too loud and someone gets the bright idea to start dancing. They’re not sure where they fit in with the party: this isn’t their reality, but they almost died today, too.

By unspoken agreement, they head back to their quarters. They’ll never understand what it means to survive _again_ , so they leave the music and suspiciously strong alcohol behind. Instead, they walk close to each other, unwilling to bend to ideas of personal space and step a few inches away from the one person who makes surviving alone, without the people they know, with a daughter that’s theirs but not, in a reality and time so removed from their own, seem okay.

The walk from the mess hall to the building housing their quarters is short but they make it last, walking every inch of concrete sidewalk even if it means detouring past the front door three times. Somewhere near the flagpole, its faded American flag still fluttering proudly in the wind, their hands brush against each other. They glance at each other in the starlight, smiling softly, and their fingers tangle together, holding on tightly. They keep walking.

Some of the party has moved outside and they walk by groups of people passing around bottles and cups. Someone’s started a bonfire. Jack’s thumb rubs against Sam’s palm and they turn a corner into the shadows of the building.

His lips brushing against hers catches both of them off guard.

Jack pulls away, an _I’m sorry_ forming on his lips as he searches her eyes for some sign that this isn’t the stupidest move he’s ever made.

Sam tilts her head, studying his face as she licks her lips, thinking he tastes of cake and that his hand could stay warm on her lower back for all eternity and it would never get old.

He opens his mouth to fumble through an apology but his words are stopped by her finger on his lips, gently shushing him. She drops her hand to his shoulder and leans in, tentatively kissing him in return. Her hesitation dissolves when his hand urges her body closer to his and she loops her arms around his neck, her eyes fluttering shut as he slips his tongue past her parted lips. His fingers glide underneath her shirt, gently caressing the sensitive skin of her sides. She moans and the sound travels straight to his groin and he kisses her harder. Her back hits the brick wall.

They break away, breathless, and Jack rests his forehead against hers. “Sam,” he whispers, voice low with arousal. The stolen kiss during the time loop was great but this, this is wonderful and he wonders how he ever thought that one kiss would be enough. He’s having trouble keeping himself from stripping her shirt off right there.

She looks at him through heavy eyelids and any thoughts of the last time she kissed him, with the damn alien virus coursing through both their veins, are pushed aside when his thumb dips just below the hem of her pants. “Let’s go inside,” she breathes, answering aloud the question that’s been burning in the back of her mind for months.

Jack smiles and clasps her hand in his. They retrace their steps, unnoticed by the drinkers and partiers and those intent on staying awake to greet the dawn in celebration of surviving yet again. Once inside their quarters, Sam locks the door behind them as Jack pushes her up against it to kiss her more thoroughly. She gasps, his lips finding her neck, and tugs his shirt out of his pants so she can run her hands along the hard muscles of his back. Needing more – so much more – of her, Jack reluctantly pulls away from that sensitive spot behind her ear and begins slowly walking them backward to the bedroom. Clothing is discarded piece by piece along the way as they pause to tug shirts over heads or laugh as they trip when they try to remove pants without first casting off shoes, and by the time they reach the bed, it’s only skin.

* * *

He’s watched her wake up before. Offworld, her eyes snap open at the first beep of her watch alarm and she sits up, blinking away the last vestiges of sleep while she neatly folds her sleeping bag and calls out to whoever is on watch that coffee had better be ready; by the time she unzips the tent and breathes in fresh morning air, she’s alert and focused, ready to face the day not five minutes after it begins. And in the past weeks, when they’ve slept with limbs tangled around each other, searching out for comfort and familiarity even in sleep, she’s awoken similarly, sliding out of bed before him, careful to extract herself from his embrace without waking him. But as she begins to stir, still tucked in his arms, he thinks that Sam waking up is a thing of beauty.

She sighs sleepily and shows signs of consciousness. Cat-like as she arches her back and stretches her legs, pointed toes creating an elegant, clean line from her hip downward, she shifts to reach her arms over her head and complete the ritual. Her hand’s usual uninterrupted path is blocked by his chest and her eyes flutter open at the obstacle. “Hi,” she says quietly, mid-breath.

“Morning,” he smiles. He moves backward a little, lifting his arm from her bare hip so she can finish stretching. She cuddles back into his chest when she’s done and he tucks his arm around her again. “Sleep well?” He kisses her forehead.

“Mmm,” she hums happily.

Jack smiles, taking it as a yes. He runs his fingers through her hair, shoulder-length now and free from its usual ponytail. The sunlight glints off the golden strands. Though he misses _The Simpsons_ and fishing and Guinness, he would be okay if they never made it back. This life is simpler and less complicated and while there is a bit of weirdness with the not-his-daughter and not-his-reality thing, Samantha Carter is naked in his arms and kissing his chest and looking for all the world like she has no intention of talking about what this means.

He rolls so he’s on top and she pouts at him, frowning at her sudden inability to touch him the way she wants. He smirks at her crookedly, plotting, and dips his head down to catch her nipple in his mouth as his fingers dance down her stomach. Her eyes close and her legs open for him and a small noise escapes her throat that he’s pretty sure means _more, please._

He’s more than happy to comply.


	5. Chapter 5

Sam wants to bang her head on the table. They’ve had two weeks to devour the technology from the fallen warship and, except for a memorable moment where they almost blew themselves up and learned not to touch that button again, they are no closer to understanding how any of it works. Rather than boosting morale, the presence of the warship has caused more infighting and arguments than Sam suspects the base has seen in years. General McLaggen, in a rare moment of interfering with the scientific team, called a meeting to sit everyone down and give an impassioned lecture about the merits of working together. Though given by a wonderful speaker, the speech failed miserably (mostly, Sam suspects, because they all knew why they were there and that it felt a bit like being called to the principal’s office) and the room erupted into shouting and finger-pointing the moment he asked for everyone’s thoughts. Sam glances at the general and he looks like he’s given up.

“Do we still have the Tok’ra memory devices?” Alle’s voice is a whisper, a casual aside to Troy sitting next to her, but the entire room goes silent. It’s the first she’s spoken to the group since admitting that she has no idea how she figured out the phasing frequency of the warship. “Well, do we?”

Troy considers her for a moment and then nods. “Yes. But, Alle…”

She shakes her head. “Look. I have no idea how, but I flew a raider off that planet. And these controls look so familiar, but I can’t remember how to work them. We need to get at those memories or we’re going to eat each other alive.”

“Alle, you know…” Sam starts softly, remembering her own unpleasant experience with the memory device and its tendency to bring up unwanted memories.

Alle nods, silencing Sam’s protest. “I know. Which is why there will be only two people in the room when I use it. Kate and General McLaggen.”

“Alle!”

“No.” She swings her gaze to her fiancée, who is obviously upset by the choice of people. “I need Kate because I’ll probably need some Valium. And I need McLaggen because he’s the only one I trust to walk me through what I need to remember without getting distracted.” Zach opens his mouth to continue the argument, but she shakes her head. “No, Zach,” she says quietly but firmly, and he slumps back in his chair.

General McLaggen nods, relieved to have some direction again. “Alright. We try this, but you get two hours. If we can’t find what we need by then, I’m pulling the plug.”

“Thank you.”

* * *

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Sam asks as they step into the elevator to go back to their lab. She’s not sure when she started considering it _their_ lab instead of just _Alle’s_ lab.

Alle looks up at her in disbelief. “No. It’s about as far away from good idea as I can get. But it’s the only idea we have.” The doors close and she shrugs. “Besides, it’s not like I’m going to remember any of it once we reset.”

Sam nods and leans against the elevator wall. “Do you want anyone in there who knows a little bit about engineering? I’ve used one of those things and they’re pretty disorienting.”

Smirking, Alle shakes her head. “Nah. I’ve kept McLaggen in the loop, he knows what we need.” She blinks. “And if you’re even thinking about volunteering anyway, don’t.” She crosses her arms and looks sternly up at Sam.

Sam gets the feeling that she’s being protected from something and considers arguing the point. She takes a breath but notices Alle’s set jaw and an eyebrow lifted in an expression that screams _I know you are not that stupid, please don’t prove me wrong_ and thinks otherwise. “You must have been a pain in the ass growing up,” she says instead.

That breaks the tension in the small elevator and Alle laughs, momentarily forgetting what she’s signed herself up for. “You have no idea.” She blinks. “Oh, hey. You and Jack?”

Sam shifts her eyes away from Alle to stare at the floor of the elevator. “Yes?” She asks hesitantly, hoping that the easy conversation she’s developed with Alle over the past months isn’t about to get really awkward.

“Nice,” Alle says with a smile.

* * *

Puzzled as to why the base commander would be sitting alone in the mess at oh-dark-thirty, Jack detours from his path back to his and Sam’s quarters and walks toward the man. He clears his throat.

McLaggen looks up from his hands folded on the table. “Jack.” He gestures for the other man to have a seat. “What brings you here?”

Jack slides into the chair opposite McLaggen and shrugs. “I went for a walk. Everything okay, sir?”

He chuckles. “Call me Dean. You’re retired in this reality and even if you weren’t, you’d outrank me.”

“Alright,” Jack agrees. “Question stands, though.”

Dean sighs and stands up, motioning for Jack to stay where he is. He returns a few moments later with two glasses and a bottle of scotch. He pours both of them two fingers worth. Swirling the amber liquid, he raises his glass in acknowledgement of Jack before taking a sip. “I’ve known Alexandra Carter-O’Neill her entire life,” he starts. He lets the sentence hang in the air for a few moments before continuing, as if waiting for Jack to settle into the hard plastic chair for the story that’s about to begin. “I was a captain on SG-1 when she was born. She was a great kid. Tough as hell, but the sweetest girl I’d ever met. Jack was gone half the time and Sam was a workaholic, but they loved her like crazy and she rolled with whatever life threw her way. Brilliant, too. So when her name came across my desk after she’d finished grad school, I was thrilled.”

Jack simply nods and listens, sensing that the other man isn’t talking _to_ him but needs to talk where another human being can hear. He takes a sip. It’s good scotch.

“I hated sending her into trouble, but she grew up in the SGC and knew as much about alien politics as alien gadgets and wasn’t afraid to shoot when things got rough. I got an earful from Sam when I put her on SG-1, but we needed her there. A few treaties were on the verge of falling apart and for a while it felt like we were dealing with Problem Species of the Week.”

Jack knows the feeling. They’ve had their own share of months where they can’t catch a break, where every friendly-looking planet has a hidden catch and every other mission ends with a few days in the infirmary. And those months, he hated having Sam as his second because he couldn’t avoid sending her into danger; he always felt like it was his fault when she ended up injured. He knows it’ll be worse when they get back; he used to think the regulations were stupid, but now he understands. There’s only one solution.

“Alle was always straight with everyone. And one day she hopped into my office, on crutches with Shackleton hot on her heels yelling at her to get her ass back in bed, and told me that she was staying on Earth. She’d signed up to do science and I was sending her across the galaxy to broker peace treaties or instigate rebellion and she was ending up in prison more than her lab. And she’d smiled at me and said that she would’ve been fine with it except this broken leg meant she’d miss snowboarding season and that was just unacceptable. I put her back in the lab.”

Jack laughs; he doesn’t know _her_ that well but he knows himself and he knows Sam and the more he learns about her, the more he realizes that Alle lucked out and got the best of both of them. “Sounds like a good kid.”

Dean drags his gaze back to Jack. “ _Great_ kid. And then the Pentagon shut down a research project she’d been heading. Something about gravity fluctuations and binary stars and Washington couldn’t see the benefit, so they shut her down. She came into my office and for all I’d seen her deal with in the two years she was there, she just looked defeated.” He shakes his head and finishes his drink in one swallow, immediately pouring himself another. He offers the bottle to Jack but Jack declines, motioning to his own half-full glass. “Told me she wanted out, that she was a scientist and that if she couldn’t do science, she needed to go somewhere else. I made her a deal – if she stuck around until I retired in four months, I’d make sure Zach was transferred wherever she ended up going. She did. She was in Chile when the Rak’har thing started. Pentagon pulled me out of retirement; my replacement couldn’t handle scientists and scientists were what we needed. Worst phone call of my life, asking her to come back. And she had no good reason to. But she did. Demanded her old office and free reign over her team and the project.”

Jack nods, remembering his own moment of being pulled out of blissful retirement. He hated the Air Force for it at the time, but now he thinks he wouldn’t give back the past years on SG-1 for anything.

He takes a large sip and swallows thoughtfully. “I’d seen her pull some pretty impressive miracles out of thin air before. She fixed a DHD with a stick of gum, once. Reprogrammed a pretty nasty computer virus to Super Mario Brothers and sent it back. Invented math in her head. But after a few months, it was clear we didn’t know what the hell we were dealing with and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. Pentagon told her to keep going. Official line was some bullshit about how Americans don’t give up. She laughed at them, went back to Chile the next day. Washington saw her refusal to come back as treason so her name got wiped from the evac list. Sam and Jack weren’t leaving without her and most of the base wasn’t leaving without them. In the end, there wasn’t time anyway. The virus hit and it was ugly. Then they bombed the surface.”

Swirling the scotch around in his glass, Jack takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. The total destruction of his planet is something he would prefer not to imagine. He’s prevented it a few times (well, Sam prevented it, he just stood outside and shot at anyone who tried to get in the way) and they’ve come close enough to failing that images of burning cities and children crying in the streets have pushed to the front of his mind more than once. But they’ve always succeeded, in the end and by the skin of their teeth, and he can’t envision a scenario where they wouldn’t. Daniel would probably tell him that it’s his lack of imagination holding him back because they’ve run into realities where SG-1 hasn’t saved the day, but Jack’s okay not having an imagination inventive enough to think of it.

“Everyone assumed she was dead. Either that or she’d high-tailed it weeks ago in a cargo ship. But one day, she and Zach just showed up here. She had a crate of chickens and a couple goats in the back of her truck, asked if maybe she could help out. Went right to work. Then she, Sam and Jack disappeared. Everyone tried to move on, kept trying to work, but it was hard. Sam and Alle were our best hope at fixing this before we all died of old age and everyone knew it. After a month, we held a memorial service.”

The scotch burns as it slides down Jack’s throat and he thinks of home. He wonders if they’ve held a memorial service for him and Sam yet, said a few words at the ramp of the gate and then sent wreaths through the wormhole. He wonders about Daniel and whether the archaeologist thinks that they’re still out there, somewhere, trying to get home or if he’s turned fatalist in the months that half of SG-1 has been missing and instead given them up for dead. And Teal’c, if he’s stayed on Earth or has returned to the Jaffa to devote all his time to freeing his people. For the sake of everyone, Jack hopes that they aren’t still classified as missing and Hammond hasn’t assigned someone to work around the clock on getting them back. Carter’s the only one who could possibly figure that out and she’s here, with no clue.

“Then one day, Alle made it back. Alone, and two days away from death, but she was here. I read Shackleton’s report and when Alle was ready, she told me what she could remember, so I knew generally what happened. But, God, what they did to her. I’ve seen career military guys eat their gun over a third of that. I knew she was tough, but I have no idea how she’s still standing.” He throws back the rest of his scotch and swallows thoughtfully.

Jack sits in silence for several minutes, allowing the other man to pull himself together. He thinks about it and though he’d brushed past it at the time, the scars on Alle’s back are too straight, too even and too recent to be from a teenage misadventure. She may very well have been thrown out of a window by an explosion, but the thick, white lines on her back that caught his attention are from a whip. And a whip wielded by someone who knew how to use it.

“She okay?” Jack asks, finishing his drink. He has to will his jaw to unclench, suddenly fiercely protective of a daughter that isn’t his.

Dean gives him a noncommittal shrug. “Shackleton sedated her.”

Jack nods, remembering how much Sam could’ve benefited from a few sedatives on Netu and that was only a few minutes at a time. He again declines a refill and smiles goodnight at the other man when Dean stands up to leave. He sits in the moonlight alone for a few minutes before getting up, returning his glass to the kitchen, and heading out.

Instead of walking back to his and Sam’s quarters like he’d intended, Jack finds himself standing outside of the infirmary. He pokes his head in. It’s quiet and looks like every other base infirmary he’s ever had the displeasure of visiting at night. There’s a single occupied bed in the far corner and the patient is doing a bad job of pretending to be asleep while the nurse checks her vitals.

“She’s asleep, Jack.”

“Dr. Shackleton,” he says with a smile, trying to hide that he’d been caught off guard by the doctor. “Just wanted to see how she was.”

Kate forces a smile. “She’s asleep.”

“Not really an answer,” he points out.

“You didn’t ask a question.” She sighs and stares at her feet for a moment. “Look, Jack. She went through hell three years ago and she went through it again tonight. I’m not sure seeing you would be the best thing.”

Jack nods and turns to leave.

“It’s okay, Kate,” Alle’s soft voice causes Jack to turn around. She’s sitting up, a weak smile on her face.

“How are you awake?” Kate asks, walking to Alle’s bed, Jack following her. “I doped you up.”

“Your drugs suck.” She cracks a real smile. “You send Zach to bed?”

Kate nods. “Yeah. Couple hours ago. How are you feeling?”

Alle shrugs and makes a face, not actually having an answer. She waits for Kate to prepare a syringe and then rolls her eyes when Kate pushes the needle into Alle’s arm. “Thanks. Can you…” she gestures at the curtain surrounding the bed. When Jack makes a move to leave, she shakes her head.

“Sure. Night, Al.”

“Night, Kate.”

Jack pulls up a chair once the curtain is closed and most of the infirmary lights are out. “What’s up?”

Alle wipes at her eyes. “I, uhm.” She laughs a little and nods to herself. She licks her lips and starts again. “I know you’re not him. But,” she looks away and bites her lip, swallowing hard, and starts a third time. “All I’ve wanted since this started was to forget. Zach and I drove here from Chile and it was…” she trails off and stares at the ceiling. “We burned bodies the entire way,” she says, looking back at her blanket-covered feet. “They deserved something better than what they got and, for whatever reason, we survived. Seemed like the least we could do was give them some sort of closure. I had nightmares for weeks.”

Jack reaches out and covers her hand with his. He’s not sure when he became everyone’s confidante. He certainly doesn’t have any advice to give or know what comforting words to say, but he looks and sounds like their Jack O’Neill and maybe their version was better at this than he is. He’s been here long enough to notice that sometimes the lines between which reality one calls home are blurry. Alle turns her hand over and gives his a gentle squeeze. Hell has a way of making people forget details.

“I didn’t remember anything that happened to me in that prison. I woke up and was so confused, but I didn’t care. I felt what had happened; I didn’t want to remember how. My parents were dead; I didn’t give a shit about anything.”

Jack notices her eyes glaze over and knows that the drugs, however expired and ineffective, have started to kick in. If he were anyone else listening to anyone else, he’d write off her words as drug-induced ramblings. But he knows that the good drugs have a way of bringing truth to the surface, truth that would otherwise go unsaid. He stays silent, thinking that she’s forgotten about his presence.

Alle pulls her hand out of his and rubs at her eyes, “I just…I didn’t want to remember that. And I’ve wanted so much to just reset everything, without a plan, without a weapon, just so I could forget. Screw it all, hope it turns out differently.”

In that moment, Jack realizes why he’s here. Underneath the slightly-stoned gaze, and underneath Sam’s nose and his jaw line, and underneath the brilliance is a little girl who wants nothing more than to believe that she’ll wake up soon. Though they both know that this nightmare is very real, the antidote is the same.

He did the same thing for Charlie.

“Scoot over.” Jack waits for her to make room before sitting next to her on the tiny hospital bed. He wraps his arm around her shoulders and she instantly curls into him, almost climbing into his lap. As he hugs her tightly and hopes that it can provide at least some amount of comfort to her, he realizes how small she is. It isn’t just her height: he barely feels her weight as she settles against him. None of this makes sense, none of it fits with the woman who’s single-handedly trying to save the world and whose muscles ripple as she puts a bored airman through his paces and throws him to the mat when she needs to beat the hell out of something. Jack gently strokes her hair and she shudders, shaking but not crying, and he’s reminded of another woman and he thinks that maybe this makes all the sense in the world.

* * *

At first, Alle is livid when she finds out that McLaggen recorded it. She stands still in the lab and fumes quietly for a few minutes before storming into his office to yell at him, Sam hot on her heels. Sam’s pissed too and they aren’t even her memories but she thinks that someone ought to be there to make sure Alle doesn’t take a swing at him. Ten minutes into a one-sided shouting match that ceased making sense eight minutes ago and the general opens his arms. Alle rushes into his hug. Sam leaves, shutting the door behind her. Black eyes are no longer imminent.

She’s still cranky about the recording the next day even though he explained it to her (he couldn’t possibly remember everything useful and she was too far gone to remember her own name) and strictly forbids anyone besides her from watching it. She copies the file onto a USB drive, deletes the original, and hooks the drive onto her keychain so it won’t get lost or mixed up with someone else’s research.

She lets Sam see parts of it. She has a Post-It stuck above her computer with timestamps and three-word summaries and the two of them watch the disjointed memories together, frantically jotting down notes over and over again. Every so often Alle will miss the end and Sam will catch a few seconds of something horrible before Alle scrambles for the fast forward button. She politely averts her eyes and pretends like she doesn’t notice.

Sam senses that Alle’s retreating into herself, avoiding Sam unless they’re working and not talking as much as she used to. One of the timestamps on the Post-It simply has a smiley face next to it. Sam comes in one day to see Alle frantically closing out of the video but not before Sam glimpses the time at the bottom of the screen: it’s near the end of the smiley face’s range. She thinks that this isn’t the first time that Alle’s watched those five minutes.

“You want to talk about it?” Sam asks after two weeks, tired of ignoring the fact that between ten seconds of _navigation system_ and eighteen seconds of _hyperdrive controls_ is three and a half minutes of someone using Alle as a personal punching bag. She’s been dodging asking the question for days.

“No,” Alle says automatically. Her back is turned to Sam but she stiffens visibly with the question.

Sam sighs, looks at the ceiling, and counts to ten. “Look. I’m not your mom. I don’t pretend to be. I don’t know anything about her and I don’t know anything about you. But I do know that being in prison sucks. Being tortured is awful. Leaving people behind is even worse. And I know that the way to deal with all of that is by telling someone something. Anything. _Not_ staying awake for days and working on calculations that you’re going to get wrong because you’re too exhausted to remember simple math.”

Alle drops her pencil on her desk and violently spins around in her chair. “Really,” she spits out. “And I suppose you know all this because you are Major Samantha Carter in the United States Goddamn Air Force, right? And you’ve been through the training and the required post-mission therapy and given a clean bill of health a couple of times so you know your way around the whole Some Crazy Alien Shredded My Back, Please Hug Me Make Me Feel Better routine.”

Sam clenches her jaw and says nothing. She hadn’t intended to open up whatever can of angry worms has been hiding underneath Alle’s barely-composed façade as of late, but there is no way to close it again. It occurs to Sam that Alle really wants to yell at her mother for insisting on going with her to the Alpha Site because if she hadn’t, Alle wouldn’t be so alone at the end of the world. And sometimes, for brief seconds here and there, Alle seems to forget that Sam isn’t her mother.

“Everyone wants me to talk about it. They think that my big problem is that some batshit aliens decided to lock me in a dirt cell for three months and try to tear me apart. And that’s not my problem. I could deal with that. My problem, _Sam_ , is that I was tied to a chair and forced to watch as they chained my parents to a wall and slit their throats. I’ve had that memory since I woke up in the infirmary three years ago. It’s not new.” She rips the flash drive out of the computer and tosses it to Sam. “There. I’ve talked about it. You want to know anything else, watch the tape. I don’t care.” She hops off her chair and walks out, managing to make it to the hallway before breaking into a full sprint.

Sam turns the tiny green drive over in her hands. She gets up and shuts the door, sliding the deadbolt into place, and pours herself a glass of water.

With a deep breath, she pushes the drive into place and double clicks on the file. She watches the entire two hours and ten minutes without stopping.

It takes her four hours to edit the video into three parts and delete the original file.

* * *

Jack wakes instantly when Sam lifts the covers and crawls in next to him. He raises his arm and waits for her cuddle in close before tucking it around her. “You missed dinner,” he whispers. He’d thought nothing of it until he saw Alle hiding at a table in the back corner, looking very much like she was going to cry or throw up. Either they both make it to dinner or they both miss it or Sam makes it to dinner: it’s never just Alle.

Sam nods, digging her way underneath the warm blankets to be even further into his embrace. “I know.” She’d made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich after slipping a disc underneath Alle’s door. She doesn’t remember eating the sandwich, but her stomach isn’t protesting its emptiness anymore so she thinks she must have.

“Everything okay?” He kisses her temple.

She closes her eyes and listens to him breathe. She’d thought that, after watching the tape of Alle’s memories, the images of pain and torture would stick with her. But the images that haunt her are those of a blonde woman and a grey-haired man, laughing and happy and so clearly in love with each other and who would do anything for their daughter who Sam suspects made them count to ten more than either would’ve admitted. She almost looked away when her on-screen self appeared with a tray of cookies, her own memory of baking chocolate chip cookies tainted with news of her mother’s death, but forced herself to watch the happy preparation of a birthday snack for Alle’s second grade class.

Tears stung at her eyes when she watched Sam and Jack dance at his official retirement party, her head resting against his shoulder as they effortlessly glided around the room without missing a step. Their lips had met as the music came to a close and Sam still isn’t sure whether she was crying for the loss of their life and love or for the uncertainty of the love she thinks she feels. Watching herself die had been unpleasant, but she’d been prepared for that. She’d not been prepared for a bloody and dirty Jack refusing to let go of his seven year-old daughter, who’d snuck through security to meet him, as the gate room erupted in chaos after the latest mission that went downhill.

“Sam?” Jack nudges her shoulder when the silence lasts longer than he’d like.

“I love you,” she whispers, eyes still closed.

Jack almost misses the quiet declaration. He blinks. She’s not one to do anything without a mile-long explanation, so he waits patiently for the details and the second-guessing and the babbled words that never come. He holds her tighter when he realizes that it’s simply _I love you_. He brushes his lips against her forehead. “I love you, too.”

Again, he waits. He waits for the rules and regulations to make their ugly appearance, for the inevitable discussion about what happens when they get home, for everything he’d expected to be said long before they got to this point. He has a simple solution for her – after this, he’s ready for the life where you walk out of a door and know exactly where you’ll end up – when those questions do come. But they don’t.

She’s crying instead.

Somehow he knows that the tears aren’t about him or her or them (or at least the him or her or them that’s lying in this bed). He doesn’t ask her what happened or what’s wrong. He doesn’t say anything. He just rolls onto his back and takes her with him, wrapping both strong arms around her as she quietly cries into his chest.

* * *

Alle disappears. Nobody seems too concerned about it at breakfast, so Sam and Jack assume that it’s something that happens with enough frequency to be normal.

But when the overnight gate watch comes in, they have other news.

“She took out the other three guys and then pointed a gun at me, General. What did you want me to do?”

“Where did she go?”

“Hokar, sir.”

“At least it’s clean. What the hell is she doing there?”

“I don’t think Hokar was her final stop, sir. They got wiped out years ago, the planet’s a wasteland.”

“Then where the hell did she go?”

Nobody has an answer. General McLaggen calms down noticeably when he’s informed that she took food, an MP7 and a zat gun.


	6. Chapter 6

“Alexandra.”

“Teal’c.” She smiles and drops her shoulders, exhausted from the day of gate travel. Dakara is no longer an easy trip; from Earth, it takes eight other planets to arrive safely and avoid all known Rak’har nets.

He embraces her warmly. It’s the first time he’s seen her since he heard that the Rak’har had attacked Earth. To anyone else she would simply look tired and in need of a good meal, but he recognizes the haunted look in her eyes and holds her to him a bit longer than usual. “Are you not supposed to be on Earth?”

“Long story.”

He nods and takes her bag and gestures for her to join him.

“We’re close to a solution,” she says, grateful that he’s shortened his stride to match hers as they walk in the dusk. The Jaffa considered not rebuilding Dakara after the Ori destroyed the temple, but they chose it as their home and decided that no enemy could take that away from them. They pass buildings and temples and homes and though the structures may not be old, age and honor and history permeate the entire planet. She finds it comforting, as she always has.

“That is good news indeed.”

“There’s time travel involved,” she admits. “Sorry,” she laughs when Teal’c looks at her with a slightly-nauseated expression on his face.

“Still,” he says with a hint of a smirk, “it is good news.” He leads her to his tent and holds back the flap for her. Most of the Jaffa, himself included, have never felt comfortable in solid walls. “What brings you to Dakara?”

She pushes her hair out of her face. “Got a couple hours?”

Teal’c works to build the fire and prepare dinner as she begins to tell her story. She speaks of things he knows – the warnings, the attempts to fight an unknown enemy, the fallen planets and allies – and he aches again for everything that has been lost. Not even the Ori achieved such total domination. He is still unsure how or why the Rak’har neglected Dakara and, not for the first time, wonders if his is the only untouched planet remaining. He offers her a plate and a glass of water and she smiles her thanks, a smile that reminds him of her mother and he is briefly distracted by thoughts of Samantha Carter before his stomach encourages him to eat.

She waits until after they have both finished eating and darkness has completely fallen on the settlement to speak of the things he does not know. She stares into the crackling fire as she tells him about the attack on Earth and the disease that stole the lives of many Tau’ri. He is not one of them, but he feels that his time among them has made them his family and he hurts for the loss of life.

Her voice cracks when she describes the trip north and how it felt like it would never end, that she wasn’t sure what would greet them a continent away. He closes he eyes when she tells him of the funeral pyres she and her fiancée built in each town they passed and of the bodies they burned and the prayers they said. He smiles with her when she talks of the people they met, who joined them on their journey, and he feels relief when she tells him of Nicaragua and radio contact with Area 51 and learning of her parents’ survival. He’s puzzled when he does not see the same relief echoed on her face.

And then she speaks of prison.

Flames reflect in the tear tracks on her cheeks and she tells him what happened to her, what was done to her. She speaks of pain and blood and torture and screaming, of days without food and nights without sleep. She closes her eyes and describes the dirt floor and four stone walls in such detail that he can see the cuts in the stone in the back corner attempting to keep track of time. He knows that the worst is not over.

She opens her eyes and stares at him across the fire, but does not see him. His heart breaks when she whispers _they killed them_. He wants to stand up and walk around the fire and sit next to her, draw her into his arms and protect her. But he does not; her story is not over.

She wipes her cheeks and talks about no longer carving the days into the stone, about wanting to give up. She tells him that she once recited every Shakespearean soliloquy she could remember during a torture session and it only made them whip her harder. She swallows and tells him that, of all things, she worried about infection.

And then, out of nowhere, she speaks of hope.

She tells him of a guard that was never thorough, of counting and marking shift changes. She talks about getting lucky. His heart swells with pride when she tells him of her escape. He is confused when she describes awakening in the infirmary, unable to remember anything.

When she tells him of Major Carter and Colonel O’Neill, he remembers why alternate realities make his head hurt.

She looks across the fire again and again does not see him. She tells him of the Tok’ra and memory devices and his heart sinks.

She speaks of remembering.

This time, he does rise and sit next to her. He silently places his arm around her shoulder.

Alle smiles sadly and leans into his strong embrace. She succumbs, finally, to tears and clutches at his shoulders, searching for the sense of normalcy she hasn’t felt since this began. Teal’c holds her tightly while she cries, remembering times he offered the same comfort to her mother when O’Neill was missing and all seemed lost. Body-wracking sobs slow into sniffles, which turn into hiccups and eventually her breathing evens again and Teal’c feels her shoulders relax in sleep; he wonders when she last had a solid night’s rest. He slides one arm underneath her legs and keeps the other supporting her shoulders and carries her into his tent. He gently lays her down on his bed, determining the sleeping bag hooked onto her pack to be unnecessary for the night, and brushes her hair out of her face.

“Sleep well, Alexandra,” he whispers before slipping back outside to keep watch.

* * *

“Aren’t you worried?” Jack liberates the Wal-Mart’s shelf of a 36-pack of toilet paper and looks through the new hole at Zach.

“About Alle?” Zach takes two sickeningly-large jars of mayonnaise off the shelf and drops them in the cart. “Nope.”

Standing on his toes to grab the paper towels, Jack raises an eyebrow. “She’s been gone for over a week.” And, hell, he’s worried.

“Did they say Dijon or honey?”

Jack digs into his back pocket and pulls out the crumpled list. He squints, trying to read Troy’s handwriting. “Both.”

Zach drops one jar of each kind of mustard in with the mayonnaise. “She’s been gone longer before,” he points out and moves down the aisle to tackle the pickles. He looks up, sensing Jack staring at him with something resembling disbelief and has to remind himself that this Jack isn’t Alle’s father. “Alle wouldn’t run away, Jack. She likes to pretend that she’s working on the reboot for grand reasons of humanity, but she’s full of it.” He checks the expiration date on the bottom of a pickle jar and frowns but places it in the cart anyway. “She needs the last seven years to go away more than anyone still alive. She’ll be back.”

Jack nods and continues down the aisle, collecting garbage bags and zippered plastic bags and variously-sized reusable plastic containers. There’s an underlying note of concern in Zach’s voice, worry that Alle will get herself into trouble, stumble into a net, that her offworld information is two days too old, but Jack knows that’s all the emotion he’ll get from Zach on the matter: energetic worrying won’t bring her home any faster. “You are a very patient man,” he observes; he knows that if Sam wandered off in the middle of the night without so much as a note, there isn’t a power in the galaxy that could keep him from following her.

Chuckling, Zach shakes his head. “Hey, I’m just a soldier. I’m lucky she puts up with me.”

Lifting his eyebrows in agreement, Jack knocks a case of storage containers into his cart. He knows the feeling.

A squeaky cart wheel attracts the attention of both men. Troy pushes the cart in their direction, full of frozen fruit and vegetables, with Sam walking next to him, licking at a vanilla ice cream cone.

“Carter got the ice cream machine working,” Troy says with a smile.

Jack grins. “Of course she did.”

* * *

Sam has almost gotten used to the idea of working alone again when she hears shouting coming from the base’s front entrance. She detours away from the mess, choosing to eat lunch later, and heads toward the voices.

“General, my apologies. I should have left a note or taken someone else with me or at least said _hey, I’m leaving for a bit_. And I didn’t. I’m sorry.” Alle crosses her arms and stares defiantly up at General McLaggen.

“You shouldn’t have gone at all, Alle,” he says. “You didn’t know if new nets had appeared, if the Rak’har had taken Dakara…”

“I’m not an idiot, General,” Alle interrupts, “and I know you know I’m not an idiot so I don’t appreciate you treating me like one.”

Sam’s eyebrows shoot up. She’s thrilled that Alle seems to have found her fire again but she’s shocked at the attitude that comes with it. No Air Force General she knows would put up with that from a civilian, no matter how much war they’d been through together or how well they know each other. General McLaggen does not disappoint.

“Doctor Carter-O’Neill, you are our best hope of erasing the past seven years of hell. We would all be dead in the water if you disappeared on us simply because you needed a break. Go to Utah next time you need two weeks off.”

Sam jumps when Jack places his arm on her shoulder.

“How long has this been going on?” He whispers in her ear. He had been eating lunch when he heard the shouting.

She shakes her head. “I got here a couple minutes ago.”

“I get it. I screwed up, I am not allowed to go offworld again, and I will forever lament the fact that we will be stuck in this hell for two weeks longer because I needed to clear my head. May I remind you that I took absolutely no time off when my parents were killed? That I took no time once my body was healed to attempt to heal my mind? And perhaps I was due a bit of a break?”

Jack mutters “Let it go, Alle,” under his breath. Sam nods in agreement.

“Again, Doctor Carter-O’Neill. Utah. Colorado. California. Hell, drive back to Chile.”

“General, I have been traveling for three days. They dropped a net between Chulak and Hokar while I was on Dakara and it took me a while to find a way around it. I need a shower, a sandwich and maybe a nap. Then, if you’re still not done with the scolding, we can pick this up again.” She hoists her pack onto her shoulders and walks off in the direction of her quarters.

* * *

The next morning, Sam resigns herself to working alone for the day when Alle doesn’t arrive after a few hours. The silence still bothers her; she hadn’t realized how much she’d grown accustomed to the steady thud of music or Alle’s constant tapping of her pen against the table until both are missing. She smiles to herself and wonders if she’s going to need to invest in a set of speakers when she gets home. She’s in the middle of setting up a diagnostic on part of the warship’s engine when she hears Alle’s chair squeak.

“Hi,” Alle says.

Sam smiles at her. “Hi.” Sam watches Alle play with the hem of her summery skirt.

“I feel like I owe you an apology,” she says suddenly.

“You don’t.”

“Yeah,” Alle nods, “I do.” She takes a deep breath and sighs. “I’m sorry I told you to watch the tape.”

Sam shrugs. She’d like to say that she’s seen worse but the truth is, she’s not sure she has. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

Alle nods again and bites her lip. “Thanks for the CD. It helps.”

Sam smiles; she found that splicing together the happy memories had done wonders to lift her mood after watching the entire recording and thought it might do at least a little of the same for Alle. “You’re welcome.”

“What are you working on?”

Sam accepts the topic shift as the end of the discussion and turns back to her computer. “Figuring out their power source. It’s a weird mix of naquadah and something I haven’t seen before.”

“May I?” Alle gestures to the screen.

“Sure,” Sam stands up and lets Alle start to work.

* * *

Unable to concentrate in her quarters any longer, Sam glares at Jack – who pretends to be innocent, as though his fingers hadn’t just been dancing up her leg in an effort to encourage her to put her laptop down and pay attention to him – closes her laptop and unplugs the power cord from the back. “Later,” she promises, and kisses his forehead before leaving. She sighs in the hallway, deciding where to go to work. Settling on the mess, she tucks her laptop under her arm and heads in that direction.

She hears laughter before she reaches the open doors and hesitates for a moment before deciding that the company might help. The dulcet tones of Dusty Springfield singing about the son of a preacher man filter out of someone’s laptop and Sam smiles and heads over to the table occupied by Alle, Kate and Troy. “What are you guys working on?”

“Inventory,” Troy says glumly and deletes a line. He consults a notepad next to him, covered in scribbled pen, and changes a few numbers on his screen.

“Giovanni! How are we on flour, sugar, yeast, baking soda and baking powder?” Alle shouts in the direction of the open kitchen door. Numbers and pounds are shouted back at her and she enters them on her spreadsheet.

Kate gestures for Sam to take a seat. “McLaggen wants monthly inventory reports. Misery loves company.”

“You know what we need?” Alle takes a swig of her beer and props her feet up on the unoccupied chair next to her. “More cows.”

“I don’t think cows like Nevada.”

“Neither do I, and I’m not complaining –”

“You just did.”

“ – but we only have three and we’re running through milk and butter a little faster than I’d like.”

“Talk to the Utah guys. See if they’ll bring some back for you.”

“You think they’d do that?”

Troy shrugs. “They’re killing a bunch. How hard can it be to tag a few to live and herd them onto a truck?”

“Sure.” Alle writes a note to herself on a Post-It and goes back to cataloging baking ingredients. “G! Cardamom, chili powder, cinnamon, clove, coriander, cumin and curry powder, please.”

“Is that his real name?” Kate frowns at her screen.

“Doubt it. But it’s what he wants to go by, so.”

“Bad news, guys,” Kate says. “We’re out of birth control.”

Alle sets her beer bottle down on the table with a little more force than is required. “Are you kidding?”

“No. The pill expired a year ago, so we need to toss it, and we have two months of patches and shots left. And you,” she points at Alle, “have maybe a month left on your IUD before I absolutely have to take it out. You’re pushing it as it is.”

“Shit,” Alle curses and finishes her beer.

“Can I ask a stupid question?”

“Why not use condoms?” Kate fills in the question. Sam nods. “They all expired two years ago. Birth control pills have at least some effectiveness a year or two past their expiration date; condoms have maybe a month.”

Under normal circumstances, Sam thinks that the lack of birth control options wouldn’t be much of a problem: the planet needs to be repopulated. But the frustration makes sense since they’re trying to reboot, at which point the last seven years – and anyone who was _born_ – would not have happened. She keeps silent about the condoms she and Jack have; they’re standard offworld kit supplies (“If you can’t be good, at least be safe,” was Janet’s stern warning after a member of SG-7 came back with a painful, but treatable, alien STD; the condoms became required of all offworld teams after that) and definitely not expired, but the two of them need them. Her birth control ran out months ago and there is no time reset when they go home; they’ll have aged and will remember everything and if anything physical changes, it will stick. She’s not sure how they ended up with as many as they did – probably Daniel, while trying to make room in his pack for an extra language dictionary, stuck his in her pack – but she’s glad it happened.

Alle exhales loudly. “The Rak’har are screwing with my uterus.”

“I’m sure they’re doing it on purpose.”

Sam watches as Alle reaches under the table and pulls out a small dart gun from an ankle holster hidden underneath her jeans. Calmly, Alle points it at Troy’s head and shoots him square in the forehead.

“Oh, bitch!”

“Gimme your target, buddy.” She holds out her hand expectantly and wiggles her fingers as Troy digs a crumpled index card from his back pocket and slaps it into her palm.

“I thought this was over,” Sam says.

Kate shakes her head. “Nope. Dart Wars ended in September. This is Assassins.” She calls up another spreadsheet and grays out Troy’s name and drags his target next to Alle’s name.

“You guys get really bored, don’t you.” It’s not a question.

“This is nothing,” Troy says, reaching down to the floor to pick up the stray dart. “This one,” he gestures to Alle with the dart before handing it back to her, “once replicated an entire season of _Mythbusters_ in a week.”

Alle shrugs and tosses a piece of popcorn in her mouth. “My parents had just died and I woke up from a coma to find out that you losers hadn’t gotten any further in three months without me. I wanted to blow stuff up.” She gets up and collects everyone’s empty beer bottles.

“‘Cause that’s healthy,” Kate grouses, but lets it go; she’s had enough time to disapprove of her friend’s coping methods. “We’re also about to be out of Band-Aids. Whoever’s making the Utah list, can you put those on there?”

“What’s in Utah?” Sam asks, helping herself to some popcorn.

“A small group of Mormons who keep us stocked in beef and apples. It’s their way of thanking us for trying to fix this whole mess,” Troy says.

Alle returns to the table with a fresh round of beer for everyone, including Sam. “There are similar groups around the country. Some of them came out here; most of them chose to stay where they were. Occasionally we make it to them for supplies or they come here to trade.”

“Oh, God,” Kate practically moans. “Max should be coming in soon.”

“Guy from Maine,” Alle fills in Sam. “Has this tiny two-prop plane, brings in lobster twice a year for us. He has a little crush on Kate.” She says the last bit mostly to irritate Troy.

Troy patently ignores her. “Why do I even need to do this? My guys don’t go through supplies as quickly as your people do.”

“If your guys didn’t manage to get themselves hurt…” Kate says at the same time as Alle says “If your guys didn’t eat as much…” and they both laugh.

Sam laughs with them and takes a swig of the beer. She checks the label: hand-drawn and colored with _Rajan’s Winter Brew_ lettered over an image of a sun setting over a lake. It’s good. “Why are you doing food inventory?” She asks Alle.

“‘Cause McLaggen doesn’t trust anyone else in the kitchen to count properly.” She sighs. “And we are out of couscous. And curry powder.”

“Not gonna find either of those in Utah.”

“Better step up the science, Al. Otherwise you’re going to start having babies and they’re going to have to eat very bland food.”

“Were you this annoying when we were on a team together? Or did I just walk far enough behind you that I didn’t have to hear it?”

Sam lets the banter fade into the background and focuses on the condensation dripping down the sides of her beer bottle. She hadn’t thought about the future of this reality beyond her participation in it; if they find a way to send everyone back, she has no doubt that Alle and General McLaggen will insist on everyone going home even if there isn’t a functional weapon yet. And if what Kate says is true, and they’re about to be completely out of artificial birth control, things will get very complicated as soon as babies are involved. Sam swallows a mouthful of beer and resolves to work even harder so no one is faced with that problem.

* * *

>   
> 
> 
> **TO:** Boyd, Carter, Carter-O’Neill, Donovan, Hafley, Orlean, Rabinowitz, Torrini  
>  **DATE:** 1/16/35  
>  **FROM:** General McLaggen  
>  **RE:** Meeting
> 
> 0930, Alle’s lab. You figured out how to work this stuff. Now what?
> 
>   
> 

Sam idly takes notes and tries to pay attention but finds herself distracted by the doodles of robots that Alle draws in the margins of her notepad. After about half an hour, they begin to start chomping on words and names until the entire page is taken over by science-hungry machines. Alle catches Sam staring and grins, immediately adding horns and a tail to the robot overlord at the top. Five minutes after beginning, the meeting devolved into a series of time travel arguments that aren’t doing anything except giving Sam a headache.

“If we hop into an alternate reality to reboot, there’s no guarantee that we’ll end up where we should. We need to do it from our reality.”

“No, we can’t. The first rule of time travel is that you can, in no way, chance an interaction with your past self. We’d run into that problem if we did it from ours.”

“But my original point still stands. What makes you think that an alternate reboot would send us home?”

“Because by rebooting and taking out the Rak’har, it ensures that the actions that cause our reaction never occur. Alle, what do you think?”

“I actually don’t understand this argument,” she says, dragging her eyes away from her robots, her fingers tangled in her hair as she rests her head in the palm of her hand. “Both of you have legitimate points, but they’re both based on assumptions. You are both assuming that the reboot has to occur at the moment where everything went to hell. You’re also both assuming that the reboot has to be a direct action on our part. Both of you have completely overlooked alternate, less-invasive possibilities. And while I agree that we’re pretty much past the point of inaction being a viable option, I’m a little disappointed that you two have somehow managed to ignore all other possibilities here.”

“If you want to add anything to this – by all means, speak.” Boyd tosses his pen on the table and sits back in his chair, crossing his arms.

“Going back in time, to this reality or another, and taking out a few Rak’har warships just means that there’s a future us hanging around. It doesn’t negate our time jump and clean up the timeline.”

“Why not?”

“Because the attack on Earth is not the inciting action. We’ve all been operating under that chief assumption for years and it’s wrong. The inciting action that needs to be prevented is something else. Earth was not the first target, so fighting off the Rak’har once they’ve shown up at Earth is a useless exercise and they’ll just keep sending more ships. We need to prevent them from ever getting a foothold in the galaxy. What was the first incident?”

“The Land of Light.”

“Nope.”

“Chulak.”

“No.”

“Langara.”

“ _No_. Don’t make me find the grad student to embarrass you.”

“The Asgard,” Sam offers, recalling a single line in a stack of mission reports from that year. She remembers being impressed that her father had an Asgard ship named after him.

Alle points at Sam and smiles. “Bingo.”

“No, it’s not. The Asgard left, they have nothing to do with this.”

“They have everything to do with it,” Alle argues. “They left because the Rak’har attacked the _Jacob Carter_ and they didn’t have the proper defenses. They figured that if the most technologically-advanced ship their scans picked up couldn’t handle them, nobody else could. If we can upgrade the _Jacob Carter_ ’s weapons and keep the Asgard in the galaxy, we’ll solve the problem.”

“How do we do that?”

“I don’t know.” Alle stands up and wipes off the chalkboard. She writes PROBLEM #1 on one side, PROBLEM #2 in the middle and PROBLEM #3 on the other side. “Okay. Problem Number One is developing weapons.” She writes _big space guns_ on the board. “Problem Number Two is getting the Asgard to go along with it.” _Thor_ goes on the board.

“Wait, what makes you think they won’t go for it?”

“Have you _met_ the Asgard?”

“Right.”

“Problem Number Three is getting everyone who’s in the wrong reality back to the right reality and time.” _no place like home_ makes it underneath PROBLEM #3. “We don’t know if rebooting here will cause everyone else to magically go home or do something really weird. So I’d like to get people home first.”

“Uhm…” Sam raises her hand.

“Sam has a question,” Alle says, nodding to her.

“As one of those people who shouldn’t be here…do you have any idea whether we’re going to remember everything or not? Normal time travel –”

“Exactly how far out of the box are we that we have to qualify something as normal time travel?” General McLaggen interrupts from his spot at the head of the table.

Sam ignores him; the correct answer is _so far we don’t even know what a box looks like anymore_ but she’s pretty sure he knows that. “– and resetting the timeline correctly means that nobody remembers anything. That’s how it works. But leaving the reality before the reset means that we’re outside of the affected timeline. But since we only showed up here because your reality was screwed up and I assume the goal is to put us back when we came from, will we remember any of it?”

Alle thinks for a minute and sets the chalk down by the eraser. “From a preservation of the timeline philosophical sense, you shouldn’t. You’d be going back in time with detailed knowledge of the future – a future that isn’t yours, but a _future_ – with the ability to change things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to change. But from a scientific, what will actually happen sense? I’m pretty sure you will. As you said, you’re leaving this timeline and re-entering your own before the reset happens.”

“Actually,” Jeff, a quantum mathematician with a disturbing sense of humor, raises his hand, “that part I’m confused on. Wouldn’t we want to do it simultaneously? Send everyone home and reset? If we just send people back and then wait a few days before resetting, there’s a very large chance that everyone could end up back here before the reset happens.”

Alle nods. “Yes. That’s a detail thing at the moment, since we don’t know how to send everyone back and there’s no point in resetting until we can do that and fight off the Rak’har. But the plan is to do it really fast. Plus,” she returns her gaze to Sam, “it might be handy to have a few people in other realities who know how to get rid of these guys so this doesn’t happen in your future.”

“Okay,” McLaggen stands up. “Alle, I’m officially putting you in charge of this. Figure it out.”

Alle cracks her neck and waits for him to leave. “Shut up,” she says when everyone starts talking at once. “One thing at a time. No sense in dealing with the Asgard if we don’t have anything to give them. And no sense in figuring out how to send everyone home until we have a reason to do so. Problem number one is top priority.”

* * *

“Zach!” Jack jogs down the hallway to catch up with him. “Have you seen Sam recently?”

“Recently?”

“Last couple of days?”

Zach shakes his head. “Nope. Have you seen Alle?”

“No.”

The two men look at each other and groan. “Lab,” they say in unison, both aware that they’re going to encounter two very caffeinated women when they get there.

“What the hell?” Jack speaks first.

The second room of Alle’s lab, previously ignored in favor of containing the chaos, has been turned into a fully-operational engineering lab. Power tools and bits of metal and discarded circuitry are scattered on the concrete floor. The two laptops facing the door are running diagnostic screens, and Jack assumes that the five he can’t see are doing something similar. Cables criss-cross each other and hang in the air in a complex system of wiring that will create the world’s most frustrating knot when finally unplugged. In the middle of the thinly-organized chaos stands a six-foot tall machine that looks like it belongs in a Jules Verne novel. Part of it beeps. On the top step of a ladder, Alle leans over and pushes a circuit board into its place. She pulls a welder’s mask over her face and turns on a soldering gun, sealing the circuit board in place.

“What are you guys doing?” Zach asks hesitantly, not sure he wants to know.

Alle climbs off the ladder and sets the soldering gun down. She pulls the mask off and smiles. “Building a weapon.”

“Uh huh,” Zach says. “What’s it do?”

Sam rolls into view and sits up. She pushes against the floor and rolls back and forth on the mechanic’s seat underneath her, smiling widely. “It creates a negatively-charged positronic emission field that disrupts the temporal-realistic shifting phase, effectively forcing everyone to stay where they are. The Rak’har technology is quite amazing, actually. It defies all laws of conventional physics…”

“Ah! Carter!” Jack puts his hands over his ears. “Don’t need the physics, just need the purpose.”

“She’s right, though,” Alle says, cracking open an energy drink can that Zach immediately takes away from her. She pouts at him and reaches for it and he simply holds it over her head. “It is kinda cool.” She punches him in the arm. “Give it.”

“When was the last time either of you slept?” Zach gestures at Sam and Alle with the can before drinking half of it himself. He makes a face. “Did this stuff always taste this bad?”

Sam squints. “What day is it?” She brushes her forehead with the back of her hand and leaves a smudge of grease.

“Okay,” Jack says. “Break time.”

“No,” Alle shakes her head and finally succeeds in getting the remainder of her drink back from her fiancée. “We’re almost done and then we need to test it. If I take a break now, I’ll never remember what the hell I’m doing.”

Sam points at Alle with a water bottle covered in NASA stickers. “What she said.” She unscrews the lid and takes a sip.

Jack recognizes sleep deprivation when he sees it, but also knows that Sam isn’t one to pay attention to her body’s need for sleep when she’s in the scientific zone and he can’t very well order her to stop for a few hours. He shrugs. “Don’t blow yourselves up.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part Three: New World in My View  
> 

Colonel Richards finally relents, on March 15th (Jack knows the exact date because the rag-tag school the base has scrambled together puts on a very low-budget version of _Julius Caesar_ that Sam drags him to and chose the date meaningfully) and assigns Jack to the watch rota. Sam and Alle try to hide their excitement as best as possible – he’d taken to sitting in their lab and asking questions whose answers he didn’t understand – but he catches Sam whispering _thank God_ under her breath when he mentions being on “Gate Watch” and pretends to be insulted.

It’s boring.

He expected it to be boring, but not this boring. After two days, he decides to stuff his pack with office supplies and back issues of _Wired_ and begins building an arsenal of toy weapons. He proudly shows off his pen-and-ruler crossbow to Sam one night but she frowns and takes it away from him. He tries not to sulk when she disappears with it for an hour (he _is_ used to her taking toys out of his hands so he doesn’t hurt himself or blow anything up, but the toys are usually alien devices, not pieces of office warfare). But she comes back with it, having replaced the rubber band with a piece of elastic tubing and exchanged the ruler for a strip of staff weapon-proof Kevlar, and offers it to him with a kiss on his cheek.

“Best girlfriend ever,” he says, after testing it out and discovering that her version shoots the pen cartridge clear across the room, only stopped by the closed door of their quarters.

“Girlfriend, huh?” She quirks an eyebrow, but can’t quite hide the smile.

He shrugs; though calling her his girlfriend when they haven’t even been on an official date seems odd (and he’s way too old to have a girlfriend anyway, not without it sounding like he’s one of those ancient guys who dates twentysomethings), he doesn’t know what else to call her. “Yeah.”

The smile widens. She hasn’t been anyone’s girlfriend since she joined the program. The label sounds ridiculous and perfect all at the same time.

After collecting the pen and crossbow and putting both in his pack for tomorrow, Jack settles next to her on the couch and slides his arm around her shoulder. The moment is oddly domestic and he frowns, feeling like they should probably be watching the nightly news instead of staring at a blank wall. With a little bit of maneuvering, he lies down on his back with Sam resting on his chest. “How was your day?” He asks, gently rubbing her shoulders. They’ll have to move to the bed at some point – they’ve fallen asleep on the couch like this before with disastrous results in the morning – but it’s still early and in lieu of actual nightly news to watch, it seems perfect.

“Oh,” Sam says; in the excitement of the crossbow and discovering that she now has a boyfriend, she’d forgotten about the rather important news she’d intended to share with him the moment he came back from his watch. “We figured it out.”

“Yeah?” His hands gradually trail lower and lower, until his fingers are teasing at the bare skin exposed between her jeans and the hem of her shirt.

She lifts her head and smiles widely at him. “Big space guns.”

* * *

Captain Andrews squints into the night vision goggles. “What the hell is that?”

Troy takes the goggles out of Andrews’ hands and focuses on the bit of rock the other man had idly been examining for coyotes. He clicks a button on the side a few times before handing the goggles to Jack.

Jack peers through the lenses and notices several unnaturally-shaped lumps sitting where there was definitely nothing a few hours ago. “You guys have a rock breeding problem I don’t know about?”

While booting up a laptop, Troy unhooks his radio from his shoulder. “Alle, this is Gate. Come in please.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Jack points out.

“She’s there.” He taps on the keyboard and images from the goggles appear on the screen. “Alle…”

The familiar sounds of someone careening into a lab to catch the phone filter over the radio. _“Sorry! Needed coffee. What’s up?”_ Papers shuffling, probably to find a space to put the coffee.

“I’m sending you some pictures. Can you take a look?”

 _“Taking up photography?”_

“No.” Troy glares at the radio.

 _“No need to get defensive, Troy. I think it’s good. You need a hobby. But I have to break it to you – it’s dark out. Maybe you should wait until sunrise.”_ Her smirk comes across even through the crackling radio.

“Shut up. You’re worse than Kate. Sent.”

 _“Alright, give me a few.”_

“Roger that.”

Not thirty seconds go by before _“Oh, shit,”_ crackles over the radio.

“I know my lighting needs some work, but…”

 _“Shut up. I’m coming out there.”_

Jack blinks because suddenly Alle is standing right next to him and he could’ve sworn it was a thirty-minute hike to the gate from the base. “Hi.” He tilts his head in confusion.

“Venkati personal transporter,” she explains.

“Cool.” He hands the goggles to her. She plays with the focus and Jack watches as the color drains from her face, turning her cheeks bright white in the silver moonlight.

“Stay upright, Al,” Troy advises and places a steadying hand on her elbow.

“Five foot soldiers guarding three raiders. Raiders fit six; they wouldn’t send three just for five guys to stand around; there are least eight more somewhere, probably a scouting party.” Her voice grows steadier as she talks.

Jack wonders how they all could’ve missed the soldiers, but doesn’t voice his concern; it took them hours to even notice the raiders. “I guess they missed their ship.”

Alle looks sideways at Jack, silently telling him to be quiet, and squints back through the binocular lenses. “Wait. Two scouts on the ridges at three and eleven o’clock.” She turns around and scans the landscape behind them. Finding nothing threatening, she turns back to the raiders in the distance. She zooms in. “They’re not shifting.”

“What’s that mean?”

She sighs and hands the goggles to Jack. “It means that they explicitly came here. To this point in time, space and reality.”

“Which means...?” Andrews waves his hands, searching for more explanation.

Troy thumps Andrews on the back of his head. “It means get your ass up because we have a really big problem.”

Alle runs her hands over her face. “I need two people to stay here and keep an eye on our friends. Andrews, you and Connor stick around. Radio me if _anything_ changes. And we’ll talk about what the hell the four of you were really doing when you should’ve been paying attention later.” She punches a combination into the band on her left arm.

“Can we hitch a ride?” Troy asks.

“No. I’m gonna wake some people up. Try not to miss anything important on your hike back.” And with that, she disappears.

Jack feels vaguely like a five year-old scolded for spilling milk. “Oops.” He slings his P-90 over his shoulder and falls in step with Troy.

Troy shrugs; he’s heard worse from her, though usually after touching something he shouldn’t. “I think she was planning on sleeping tonight,” he says, by way of explanation.

Jack isn’t sure that sleeping really jives with needing coffee, but he’s long accepted that Sam’s understanding of proper sleep patterns when working under deadline doesn’t match with his and Alle certainly didn’t inherit her world-saving skills from her father.

* * *

Jack nearly runs into Zach when the younger man stops suddenly in the doorway of the briefing room. He casts a confused look in Zach’s direction and sidesteps him, taking a seat at the table.

“What meal are you eating right now?” Zach sits next to his fiancée.

“Lunch,” she says, and digs into her salad.

“It’s midnight.”

Alle looks at him sideways, fork halfway to her mouth, with a glare Jack knows very well from Daniel, Sam and Teal’c. It’s an expression that says _yeah, and?_ “I’m hungry and we have a lot of spinach.”

Zach sighs and leans back in his chair. “I give up.”

“You’re the one who asked me to marry you.” She spears a tomato.

With the amount of eye rolling that goes on by the others in the room, Jack suspects that this is an exchange that happens often.

Sam slides into the chair next to Jack, setting her own salad in front of her. “Oh, I didn’t know there were cranberries,” she says, peering forlornly into Alle’s bowl.

“Want some?” At Sam’s nod, Alle slides her bowl over. She smiles when Sam slides it back with a _thank you_.

Jack doesn’t bother voicing his confusion about the situation. He’s fairly certain that his alternate self went gray a lot faster than he did and it was entirely the fault of these two women.

General McLaggen rushes into the room and Jack thinks that the man looks pretty good for being roused out of bed not thirty minutes earlier and debriefed – according to a conversation Jack overheard in the hallway – in his pajamas. If Jack were in McLaggen’s position, he’d probably wander in with his hair sticking up at odd angles and his shirt buttoned unevenly. And his shoes on the wrong feet, if he even remembered shoes.

“Start from the beginning,” McLaggen orders. He listens intently, occasionally jotting down notes, as Jack and Troy describe what they saw and radio Andrews back at the gate for a thankfully uneventful update. He nods solemnly and turns toward Alle. “What do you have for us?”

Jack watches as Alle looks up from her notepad, salad finished, and pushes her hair out of her face. She doesn’t bother to mask the exhaustion in her eyes and he thinks there might be fear lurking there, too.

“Best case scenario – our weapon works and locks them into phase with us and we start shooting and blow them off the face of the planet. Worst case scenario – our weapon doesn’t work, they shift, go home and come back in a week with a lot of friends and destroy us.”

“You mean you don’t know if this thing works yet?” McLaggen raises his eyebrows.

Sam opens her mouth to defend science and the method of scientific inquiry and say that they’re reasonably certain the weapon will work and that, in this scenario, _reasonably certain_ is about as good as they could expect. Alle pointedly clears her throat and purses her lips, raising an eyebrow defiantly in McLaggen’s direction and Sam chooses to stay silent on the matter, feeling that this is a longstanding argument she’d best stay out of.

“No, General, we haven’t had a chance to test it. We didn’t want to turn on the phase shifter from the warship on the chance that it would a) disappear or b) send a signal back to the hive.”

“And what if we reset with your instructions, it turned out that the weapon didn’t work, and then the Rak’har came again anyway?”

“First off,” Alle straightens in her chair, now visibly annoyed, “there’s really no way to tell whether this is the first time we’ve encountered them. Anyone who’d traded with the Hakaan in the past ten years and picked up a temporal control relay could’ve modified it for widespread effect and reset everything in hope of a different outcome. And secondly, if that’s the defeatist attitude you really want to take, General, at least next time around we would all have a good starting point instead of spending several years getting yelled at by you people for not working fast enough.”

“Point taken,” McLaggen says, and backs down. “Harper, you got a strategy for me?”

Troy stands up and hits the dimmer on the lights. “Absolutely, sir.” He turns on a projection screen and calls up the strategy files.

* * *

“What do they look like?” Sam asks, nestling her head in the crook of Jack’s shoulder. Throughout all of Alle’s memories, the Rak’har never appeared as much more than hulking shadows. Either she had never gotten a good look at them or, more likely, she’d buried the images so deep that not even the Tok’ra devices could pull them out.

Jack sighs quietly and brings his hand up to brush a lock of hair off of Sam’s cheek. His hand wanders, traveling across her shoulder and down her arm before finally resting on her lower back. He searches his mind for the right words to describe what he saw in the starlight, but all he comes up with is “Kind of like an Unas mated with a Super Soldier.”

Sam makes a face. “Ew.” The Unas have always unsettled her, even after Daniel explained that they were gentle and kind and not as monstrous as they looked, and Anubis’ Super Soldiers still scare her, even years and several realities away from where they’re a problem. She considers asking Alle for a way to defeat them, but tables the idea for now: one untouchable enemy at a time. The part of her that’s still tangentially concerned with preserving her own timeline tables the subject for good; they’re going home with a way to protect themselves from the Rak’har, which they shouldn’t even encounter for twenty or so years, there’s no need to damage the timeline even further.

“Stop thinking,” Jack says and gently presses on her back with the palm of his hand.

Sam smiles. “I’m trying.”

Jack nods, his cheek rubbing against her hair. There are things that need to be done – that are being done – before the mission can be cleared to go as soon as the sun rises. But those things are being attended to by other people, people who have worked together for years and who have fallen right back into old patterns of working silently side-by-side and whose routines and processes would be knocked out of place by the presence of himself or Sam. They’re involved, of course, because Sam’s the only one besides Alle who knows how to work the space guns (and Alle’s going to be in the air) and Jack took extreme exception to being left out of the plan so he’s been assigned to stand somewhere with a gun, but it just seems _wrong_ to be lying in bed the few hours before a mission.

“Now _you’re_ thinking.”

“Odd, I know.”

Sam snorts. “You’re a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for.”

He lets that comment go – she’s way, way smarter than he could ever imagine, even if he is playing dumb a lot of the time – and tugs the blanket up from her waist to cover her back. It’s officially been spring for a month, but there’s a cool breeze tonight blowing through their open windows. Sam sighs contently and Jack feels her eyelashes brush against his shoulder as she closes her eyes. This is the calmest he’s ever seen her the night before a mission but this is also the first time he’s ever known her to sleep the night before a mission.

Careful not to disturb her too much – her breath has already evened out into the telltale pattern of sleep – he reaches over and clicks off the light, encasing the room in darkness until his eyes adjust to the ambient light filtering in from the lights and stars outside. He kisses her temple and murmurs sweet dreams even though this is only really a nap instead of a full night’s sleep.

* * *

 _“Remind me again why there’s no Wagner?”_

 _“McLaggen nixed it.”_

 _“Screw that. Anyone got it with them?”_

 _“Feeling a little ‘I love the smell of dead Rak’har in the morning,’ Playboy?”_

 _“Hell yeah.”_

 _“Sorry, guys, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ is in my other cockpit.”_

 _“Shut your mouth, Hardball.”_

 _“Keep your pants on, everyone; I’m working on it.”_

 _“Einstein to the rescue.”_

 _“As always.”_

 _“What would you losers do without me?”_

 _“Fly in silence, I guess.”_

 _“Actually, I think we’d all be dead.”_

 _“Aw, Krypton. Protecting your girl’s honor?”_

 _“I can protect my own honor, Gladiator. Shut the hell up or you get no Wagner.”_

 _“Well if you’re going to hold German opera over my head…”_

 _“Just think, guys. When I was seven, I wanted to be a professional ballerina.”_

 _“Beginning to regret not following that career path?”_

 _“Little bit.”_

 _“I think that’s enough chatter, folks.”_

Sam stifles a chuckle when General McLaggen’s stern command elicits a chorus of _yes sir_ s. She adjusts the earpiece of her radio and checks the balance of the gun in her hands. She fiddles with it, settling the Rak’har disruptor more securely on the body of the gun. It’s held on by duct tape.

“That thing needs a better name,” Jack says and motions to her gun with his.

Sam shrugs and rubs at her eye, forcing a grain of sand back out where it belongs. She tunes out last minute flight instructions to the X-314 pilots – idly hoping that the high number is due to changes in seat design instead of fatal malfunctions – and settles in against the rock she’s decided is hers. They’ve called the weapon any number of unwieldy names – _anti-Rak’har shifting weapons, phase-solidifying field generator_ – but none of them seem to stick beyond five minutes. “Like what?” She asks, finally content that the sand is out of her eye. “Vera?”

Jack gets the feeling that he’s missing a geek joke but doesn’t press the issue. “Sure.”

McLaggen runs through the plan one more time, just in case everyone managed to forget in the last few hours. Three X-314s will fly over the Rak’har camp, partly as a distraction and partly to make sure that they haven’t done anything overnight that would screw up the plan. Zach, also in an X-314, will zoom in while the Rak’har are sufficiently distracted and Alle fires the weapon at them (there was a bit of argument when Troy mentioned that they’d be together, but Alle pointed out that they doubled up all the time before McLaggen decided to split SG-1 upon discovery that Alle and Zach were dating and besides, she said, there was no way she was getting in a plane piloted by anybody else); if it’s successful, they radio back to everyone else to start shooting and then it becomes a fairly standard offensive mission. Sam will hang out on the side with another weapon just in case it turns out that the effects wear off after a bit, and hopefully they’re all done in time for lunch.

If it’s not successful, they’re really screwed.

Sam laughs as the opening notes to “Ride of the Valkyries” starts playing over the radio. “Showtime.”

Jack ducks as the X-314s fly over his head, the roar of their engines almost deafening in the silence that had previously settled over the desert. He’d forgotten how loud battle could be, and they haven’t even started shooting yet. Someone has the good sense to turn the Wagner down a few notches so they can hear radio communication.

 _“…more. Repeat, three extra bogies on the ground; total of six. Count twenty-eight, that is two-eight, uglies. Rock ‘n roll, Krypton.”_

Jack makes a face at the news that more have appeared in the scant hour that they had nobody keeping watch, but Sam simply shrugs. It doesn’t matter how many Rak’har are out there: the weapon will affect all of them or not at all.

 _“Roger that, Playboy. Package is on its way.”_

Ready for it this time, Jack merely looks up and offers a casual salute to Zach as he expertly pilots the plane into position. It hovers motionlessly above the desert, the air shimmering in the wake of the engines. “Any time now,” Jack mutters to himself and ignores the rock kicked in his direction by Sam at his impatience.

The plane jerks in the air and a smoky blue beam of light shoots out of the weapon mounted on its belly. There’s a horrific screeching noise that reminds Jack of nails on a chalkboard and then, silence.

Sam grimaces: they hadn’t tested it, but they certainly weren’t expecting that to be the end result of pulling the trigger. She mentally runs through the diagnostics Alle is running in the air. It should only take a few seconds, but Sam begins to wonder whether there’s a time dilation side effect they didn’t account for.

 _“Ladies and gentlemen, go forth and kill the bad guys. We have a go.”_ Alle’s grin is audible over the radio and within seconds, Jimi Hendrix and “All Along the Watchtower” replace Richard Wagner.

The excitement at successfully knocking out the Rak’har’s main defenses is short-lived, however; in the seven seconds it took Alle to make sure it worked, the Rak’har also discovered that it worked and had spent the time wisely, arming themselves.

Jack personally thinks that the flaming bullets are a bit overkill.

Somewhere amidst the cheering on the radio, the guitar and the cacophony of bullets beginning to fly, he’s sure is an order from General McLaggen to please start firing. It’s more out of habit and for formality’s sake than anyone needing to be told to shoot; if Jack’s gone a little crazy not shooting anything for ten months, he can’t imagine what these guys are feeling having gone nearly six years without firing a single shot. As he ducks out from behind the rock to fire a few rounds, he vaguely registers Sam shifting the Rak’har gun around her back and picking up her actual weapon.

Rocks and sand explode around them as bullets and mortars rush into the ground, missing their targets. Jack thinks he hits a few, but even stuck in this reality the Rak’har are proving to be very difficult to kill. Sam lets out a cry and he tears his gaze away from the dusty battlefield in front of him to check on her.

He inhales sharply, seeing red blossom against the tan of her shirt. “You okay?” He shouts.

Sam grits her teeth and nods. “Just grazed my arm.” Now she’s pissed. She was pissed before, but now she’s really angry because she liked that shirt and she was two weeks shy of hitting a record number of months without being shot (that there wasn’t anyone around to shoot her didn’t seem to matter). She rips out the pin on a grenade and throws it toward the Rak’har and follows it up with a long burst of gunfire, ignoring the pain in her arm.

Jack watches her for a few seconds, just to make sure she really is okay, but finds himself mesmerized by the way she moves. He’s watched her shoot a gun before, but her aiming and firing combined with moving out of the way and narrating what she sees into the radio is almost elegant. He tells his stirring erection that he’ll jump her later, when she isn’t bleeding and they aren’t being shot at and there isn’t a better than even chance that one of them will end up with sand some place unfortunate, and rejoins the fight.

* * *

Jack pushes his way through the crowded infirmary to find Sam. He’d been sidetracked by Troy and Zach after the battle, both men wanting his ground report immediately so they could scramble something together to appease McLaggen and give them enough time to write up a proper debrief; Sam had been whisked away to the infirmary by someone who’d noticed the blood on her arm. He knows that it isn’t serious, and knows that she’s survived longer with far worse, but that doesn’t stop his worrying. He scans the room and finally spies Sam’s blonde hair near the back.

“…longer than we thought it would. Maybe we can increase the naquadah concentration and speed up its release.”

“Then we run the risk of it overloading if the trigger’s held for too long.”

“Okay,” Kate says. “Will you two stop geeking out for five seconds so I can bandage you up?”

Sam and Alle silence immediately, both looking sufficiently chastised. Kate smiles thankfully and starts to clean Sam’s arm.

“How’d your head get…?” Sam gestures to her forehead with her uninjured hand.

Alle frowns from the stool next to Sam’s bed. “The weapon made the whole plane kick. I hit my head on Zach’s seat.”

“I thought those were padded,” Jack says, hopping onto the bed next to Sam, making sure he’s very much out of Kate’s way.

“The headrest is. But I’m shorter than the average pilot.”

“You should’ve been wearing a helmet,” Kate grumbles. She begins rolling gauze around the now-clean wound.

Alle drops the argument with a glare at Kate’s head and then turns her attention to Jack. “Everyone okay? I haven’t heard any casualty reports.”

He gives her a thumbs up. “Because there aren’t any.”

* * *

Jack makes a mental note to have sex with post-successful-mission Sam more frequently.

He’d watched as she’d palmed the pain meds Kate had given her in the infirmary, slipping the pills into her pants pocket as soon as Kate’s back was turned. He hadn’t understood it at the time – bullet wounds hurt like a bitch whether the bullet hits you or just slices across your skin – but had stayed silent on the matter until they were safely outside, walking back to their quarters after lunch. He received a mischievous smile in response to his question and had found himself pushed up against the door the second they were inside, her lips firmly pressing against his.

“They make me tired,” she’d explained later, sliding out of bed to find her pants where they’d been cast off in the living room. Returning with a glass of water, she’d swallowed the meds before crawling back into bed and curling into his chest.

Jack hopes that the image of her walking towards him, backlit by the setting sun filtering through the curtains, completely naked and grinning, stays with him for a very long time.

She sighs and he briefly loosens his arms to allow her to shift in her sleep. He drops a kiss on her shoulder and closes his eyes. He listens to the revelry outside – and thinks he hears Alle mention _big damn heroes_ , which he thinks he needs to use as soon as possible – but Sam’s even breaths draw his thoughts back inside and to their bed. He drifts off to sleep and, for the first time in months, doesn’t think of home.


	8. Chapter 8

>   
> 
> 
> **TO:** Scientists  
>  **DATE:** 4/30/35  
>  **FROM:** Alle  
>  **RE:** Field trip
> 
> Wednesday. North Building. Wear sunscreen.
> 
>   
> 

“What’s up?” Sam spies the messenger bag slung over Alle’s shoulder and the plastic bag clearly containing food on the lab table.

Alle turns to look over her shoulder at Sam. “Change of scenery.”

“What Alle really means is that McLaggen’s running drills today and she wants no part of it. So we’re going to the north building for the day.” Jeff translates for her as he leans on the door frame.

Alle glares at him defensively and hands him their lunch. “The last time McLaggen did this I got dragged into hand-to-hand combat training and flattened ten flyboys before anyone thought better of it. Pierce is still pissed at me.”

“He’s three times your size and you gave him a concussion.”

She grabs her sunglasses from their spot on a top shelf and places them on top of her head. “Not my fault he didn’t duck. Boyd and company are already on the way. Find Steph, let’s go.” She catches Sam looking at her with a lot of skepticism. “Don’t discount the little kids. We’re maneuverable.” Picking up her car keys from a hook on the door, she leads the way to the surface.

Wondering how Alle ended up with the short genes, Sam follows Alle and swings herself into the passenger seat of Alle’s F-150, mindful of her arm, almost healed but still a little tender. There’s a collection of faded parking decals in the front window and the back bumper is covered in a combination of outdated political campaigns (Sam swears she sees a _Dukakis/Bentsen_ sticker) and scientific in-jokes. Someone had painted _Pegasus or bust!_ on the gate of the truck bed in bright pink. “What’s the S stand for?” Sam squints at the SGC parking permit and makes out _Carter-O’Neill, Alexandra S_.

Alle chuckles and starts the truck, throwing it into reverse to back out of her parking spot. “Selmak.” She smiles at Sam and shifts into first gear and then out of the parking lot, checking the rearview mirror to make sure that Jeff and Stephanie are behind them.

Though suddenly very aware of how much she misses her father, Sam manages a smile. “Really?” She wonders if anyone’s managed to contact the Tok’ra and get a message to Jacob that his daughter is missing. She mentally grimaces: she wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of that transmission.

“Yep.” The silver and blue beads that hang from the rearview mirror rattle as she navigates the speed bumps that lead up to the unattended guard gate. Alle rolls down her window and Sam does the same.

“What was it like? Growing up in the SGC?” Sam picks up a CD binder and flips through it as Alle turns on the CD player. The only empty pocket is home to an index card labeled _Queen’s Greatest Hits According to Alle_ and as the opening chords of “Great King Rat” quietly echo through the truck’s impressive sound system, Sam braces her feet against the glove compartment and leans back in her seat. She squints behind her sunglasses and makes out a perfect copy of Orion done in glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.

Alle flips down the sun visor. “Awesome. Though it was a shock in kindergarten to discover that not everyone’s dad was an interplanetary superhero.”

Sam laughs. She’s read enough mission files to know that they had to let Alle in on the secret fairly early – a group of Jaffa had showed up literally on the back porch one day and, even at four years old, Alle wasn’t buying the street gang cover story they’d tried to feed her – and, just as the Asgard needed Sam to come up with a stupid idea to defeat the Replicators, sometimes the adults of the SGC needed a child to come up with the simplest solution. She knows that it couldn’t have been all _awesome_ : Jack had a tendency to go missing in this reality and she’d skimmed over a few reports in which one system lord or another had thought that kidnapping Alle was a good idea. Sam lets the conversation fade off, the idea of Jack as a superhero too amusing to think of anything else for the moment.

For lack of anything to do in the half an hour it takes to drive the length of Area 51, Sam digs around in the back of the truck for the pack of gum Alle promises her is _back there somewhere_ and comes up with a sticker-covered Nalgene water bottle, a granola bar that’s now mostly crumbs in its wrapper, the promised pack of gum (two sticks left, and the texture of both speaks to how long it’s sat in her truck but they pop them into their mouths anyway) and a folder labeled _Crap I Rescued From Chile_. Sam shows it to Alle, who merely shrugs and tells her to go for it. She flips through the papers inside. Though she brushes past the articles and newspaper headlines and _xkcd_ comics, her fingers linger on the few pictures tucked away in the corners. Most are candid shots of Alle and Zach, and there’s a strip from a photo booth of Alle and Kate making faces at the camera, but what catches her eye are the two of her. Sam blinks at herself sitting on a piece of driftwood, Jack’s arm around her waist and her head on his shoulder, their content faces lit up by a bonfire; though the woman in the picture is older, she’s clearly Samantha Carter and looks far happier than Sam could ever imagine. She runs her fingertips over the last picture in the pile, presenting an ecstatic toddler Alle with a birthday cake, and wonders whether some version of that life is in her future.

“I wondered where those went.” Alle spares a glance at the photo in Sam’s hands. She smiles at Sam and then turns her eyes back on the road.

Sam puts the photos back where she found them and hops out of the truck once Alle’s parked in front of the unassuming building. There’s a faded sign heralding the building as A51-4D but the small print detailing the purpose of the building has long since been eroded away by sand and sun. Jeff parks his car in the spot next to Alle’s truck – Sam smiles, realizing that all five cars are parked within the lines – and the four of them head to a small cluster of picnic tables, most already occupied by the other scientists.

Hours later, with the sun high in the sky, Sam stretches out on the grass. She throws her arm over her eyes. They’ve been at this for far too long, throwing out ideas and bouncing science off of each other in an effort to break out of the inspirational logjam they’ve been in for days. With the anti-Rak’har weapon complete and PROBLEM #1 successfully wiped off the board and with a message sent to the Asgard High Council and PROBLEM #2 temporarily on hold, all they’re left with is PROBLEM #3 and getting everyone home. Sam finds it annoying that the easy part was finding a way to defeat time- and reality-jumping aliens.

“When all the alternate SG-1s showed up because someone ripped a hole in subspace, how did that get solved?”

“I don’t remember, Boyd, I was eight.” Alle sighs from her spot on top of a picnic table.

“They reversed the polarity of the rip. But it doesn’t matter – only reason that worked is because the rip is what sent all of the alternate teams to that reality in the first place.”

“Can we use the same idea? Reverse the polarity of all the nets?”

“No,” Sam says, shaking her head; the mission report was in a stack of reading Alle had given her on reality jumps. “There are a number of people who gated from the Alpha Site in different realities that all showed up here.”

“Plus,” Alle adds, “it doesn’t solve the time problem.”

“Does the reality and time shift have to happen simultaneously? I mean, can’t we give people a Hakaan relay and send them on their way?”

Alle lifts her head and squints behind Dior sunglasses. “Provided we had more than three of them? No.” She lies back down. “We’ve screwed with their timelines enough as it is. None of our tech goes back with them.”

“The Samantha Carter that’s been working on this is not our Samantha Carter –”

“Thanks for pointing that out, Boyd.”

“– and she’s going to go home with pretty detailed knowledge. How is that different?”

Alle sits up and glares at him. “For one, it’s a moot point. We have three time devices and sixteen groups of people who need them. And for two, if she hadn’t been helping, we’d be about two months behind. And for three, everyone who’s not supposed to be here – either in time or reality – is going to go home with a little bit of info they’re not supposed to have. We couldn’t avoid it.”

“Okay,” Sam says, having an idea. “Bear with the not-your-Samantha-Carter for a moment.” Boyd reminds her a lot of Rodney McKay and it’s taken a considerable amount of effort not to ask if there’s a relation. “The Rak’har have used the gate system in your reality, right? They have to have some way to keep themselves anchored otherwise they’d end up just as displaced as us. All we’d have to do is find that device and program it with the correct temporal-realistic coordinates and send everyone back through the gate to the planet they started from and the problem’s solved.” She runs her fingers through her hair and picks out a few pieces of grass.

“ _All_ we have to do?”

“Shut up, Boyd,” Alle says. “Unless, of course, you have a better idea…?” Upon his silence, she turns to a group of four scientists at another table. “Liz, did you find anything on those bodies?”

“Yep. We autopsied all of them but didn’t find anything that would indicate that their shifting abilities are natural. All of the tech we found on them went to you guys.”

“It’s in a pile we haven’t gotten to yet,” Boyd explains when Alle looks at him for a reason she hasn’t heard about this before.

“What the hell have you been working on?”

“Uh, studying the mechanics of the raiders? Not to mention the complexity of the warship’s weapons systems.”

“We’ll have the priority discussion later. Get to work on sifting through the stuff Liz gave you. Sam, you take the rest of our team and look through the rest of the raiders and anything left untouched in the warship. We still need to find the anchor and figure out how it works.”

“What are you going to do?” Though she likes the team of people she’s been working with, Sam’s a little unsure about leading them. She’s noticed that her presence still unsettles a few of them; she understands the idea that she’s supposed to be dead, but she wishes people would either get over it already or do a better job of hiding it.

Alle groans and crosses one arm over her chest to stretch it. “I have to deal with Thor.”

* * *

“Alexandra Carter-O’Neill.”

“Thor,” Alle smiles at the little gray alien. “How have you been?”

“I am well,” he says. “And yourself?”

She cocks her head to the side. “Alright. All things considered.”

“I regret to inform you that the Asgard High Council has reviewed your request, but cannot agree to it.”

Alle sighs heavily. “Figured that,” she mutters to herself. She raises her gaze from the floor. “Unfortunately, the constraints that our galaxy now faces regarding subspace messages that we do not wish the Rak’har to intercept did not allow for a full explanation of the scenario. I fear that your decision was made with incomplete information. Do you have some time?” When Thor doesn’t immediately answer, she continues. “I would assume that the relationship between Earth and the Asgard has been longstanding enough with a significant amount of mutual benefit that you would allow me the courtesy of explaining my request.”

Thor nods. “I can be spared.”

Sam elbows Jack in the side. “You could learn a few things from her.” She smirks.

Jack ignores her and glares at the retreating forms of Alle and Thor. “For the number of times we’ve saved their little grey butts with nothing but picky noninterference in return…”

Sam pats his shoulder. “Come on. They need help planting.”

* * *

Jack finds Alle later that night sitting outside, staring up at the stars. “What’s he gonna say?”

Alle looks over her shoulder and smiles at him. She pats the ground next to her. “He’ll say yes.”

“What makes you so sure?” He sits down beside her and stretches out his legs.

She shrugs. “He’s my godfather.”

“Really?”

“Well, technically Daniel and Teal’c share the title. But it was extended to Thor. Not like he has a clue what it means.”

Jack blinks at the mention of his teammates. “What happened to them? Daniel and Teal’c?”

Alle sighs. “Teal’c is on Dakara, leading the Free Jaffa. I don’t think he likes the politics much, but someone has to do it. And Daniel retired to Atlantis a few years before…” she trails off when she notices the confusion on Jack’s face. “None of that’s happened yet for you, has it?”

He shakes his head. “Nope. Still fighting off Anubis.”

She chuckles quietly. “There are days that I think everyone should have left well enough alone with the Goa’uld.”

“Are you kidding?”

She bites her lower lip and stares out into the darkness. “I know that they’re a pain. And they liked kidnapping me when I was a kid. And they do the whole slavery thing and pretend to be gods. But…there are worse things out there than Anubis, Jack.”

Jack doesn’t say anything. Twelve months ago, if anyone had asked him if he thought there were bigger and badder guys than Anubis, Jack would’ve told them to get their head checked. But he knows that he’s here having this conversation because of those _worse things_ and that the wisdom with which Alle kindly warns him of the dangers ahead is far beyond her years. “But hey,” he says after a few moments of contemplating how to break the silence, “this isn’t my reality. We might not have those.”

Alle manages a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Nope. You might be okay.”

He watches her push her hair out of her face and catches the tension in her shoulders. “He’s gonna say yes.” She turns her head and the complete desperation in her eyes throws him; she’s been so confident since the day he met her that he isn’t sure what to do with the knowledge that she’s worried that Thor might say no. “I mean, if my reality has saved them more than once, he must owe you a couple favors, right?”

She laughs and drops her head back to gaze at the sky. “Yeah, he does.”

* * *

Jack absently runs his hands over Sam’s bare shoulders. She’d been frantic, almost desperate in their lovemaking until he’d flipped them and held still above her, refusing to move until she admitted what was bothering her. They’d received word earlier in the day that the Asgard agreed to their proposal, meaning that their time in this reality will be up shortly after lunch tomorrow. She hadn’t needed to say much beyond _we’re going home_ for him to understand her fear. He’d kissed her softly then and began moving again, hoping to show her just how much going home isn’t going to change this.

He knows better than to assume that she’s asleep. He also knows better than to assume that all of her not talking over the past months means that she doesn’t need to. He presses his lips to her soft hair. “I’m gonna retire,” he says.

She stirs, lifting her head from its place on his chest to lock her eyes with his. “Really?”

He nods. “Yeah.” He knows that he’ll miss SG-1 and going offworld and blowing up system lords, and that he’ll be worried sick about her when she’s offworld, but that’s a small price to pay. He reaches up and tucks a piece of hair back behind her ear. “Going home doesn’t change anything, Sam,” he says, sensing that she needs to hear the words.

Sam bites her lip and smiles. “Okay.”

* * *

Dressed in his BDUs again with his P-90 strapped to his chest and sunglasses hanging around his neck, Jack takes a deep breath and walks to the ramp in front of the already-active gate. He shakes General McLaggen’s hand and offers Alle a hug, thanking her before stepping aside to let Sam say her goodbyes.

“You know,” Alle says, “I never really liked Alexandra. So if you two do have kids, can you go with something else?”

Sam laughs and nods, wrapping her arms around Alle’s shoulders. “Of course.” She hasn’t thought that far in the future, but she can keep that promise if and when the time comes. “Good luck,” she whispers, knowing that the hard part lies within a past Alle being able to understand this Alle’s instructions.

Alle nods and hugs her in return. “You too. And thanks.”

Sam smiles. “You’re welcome.” She looks over her shoulder once she and Jack are standing just in front of the event horizon. Her boots feel strange on her feet but the gun feels just right in her hands. She waves at Alle and Zach and McLaggen and everyone who won’t remember them in several hours once the reset occurs, but everyone that she’ll never forget.

“Ready?” Jack asks and tilts his head in the direction of the wormhole.

“Ready.”

They step through.

* * *

Alle blinks at the cupboard. “We have a _lot_ of granola.” She reaches in and pulls out the jar of peanut butter.

“Yeah,” Zach agrees, flipping through the mail. “What’s up with that?”

Spreading the peanut butter on a slice of bread, she shrugs. “I may have mentioned something to my mom about not being able to find this brand down here.”

“Can you tell her that we have enough?” Zach suggests, tossing a few pieces of obvious junk mail in the garbage. “We’re in a different hemisphere. How do these people find us?”

“Uhm… _no_ ,” Alle says, frowning as she squints and scrapes the bottom of the jar of jelly. “She’ll probably stop sending me toothpaste, too. And you work for the Air Force; it’s kind of easy to find you.” She presses the pieces of bread together and cuts the sandwich in half, slipping it into a plastic bag. She digs around in the refrigerator for carrots, determined to have a moderately healthy lunch tomorrow after a string of days of nothing but pizza. “Anything interesting?”

“Actually. A letter to you from…you?” He hands her the envelope and shrugs when she gives him a questioning look over her shoulder.

Alle stands up, bag of carrots in hand, and shuts the refrigerator door. “I didn’t send myself anything.” She sets the carrots down and holds the envelope up to the light. All she can see is a single piece of paper.

“Well it’s not big enough to be a bomb.”

She looks at him askance and slips her finger under the flap. Exhaling sharply, she unfolds the sheet of paper, recognizes her handwriting, and reads aloud. “June 3rd, 2035.” She glances at Zach. “That’s fun.” She looks back at the paper. “Under no circumstances should the _Jacob Carter_ leave the galaxy. And…this physics makes no sense.” Alle sighs and closes her eyes, shaking her head. “I _hate_ time travel. Every time it happens, I tell myself – next time, I’ll be more clear. And I never am.”

Zach takes the paper from her and scans it. “I don’t even know what this is in reference to.” He flips it over to see if there are any clues on the back. It’s blank.

Alle rubs her hands over her face and grabs her cell phone. “I think I do. I talked to the Serrakin last week and they mentioned a species called the Rak’har and I guess they’re being a giant pain. I am betting that things did not go well the first time. This,” she gestures to the paper with her phone, “is how to fix it.” She dials and cradles the phone between her shoulder and ear. “Mom, hey, it’s me. Sorry to wake you…No, no, nothing’s wrong. I just got a message from myself eight years from now…Yeah, I’ll scan it in and send it to you, thanks…love you too. Tell Dad I said hi.” She hangs up, shoves her phone back in her pocket and takes the message out of Zach’s hands.

“You know, you’re one of the smartest people on the planet, Al.” He follows her into her cramped home office.

Alle presses a few buttons and scans the message in and then emails it to her mother. “So is she. And this math?” She points to the screen. “Is really weird. Like beyond quantum mechanics multiple dimensions bizarre. There is no way she didn’t help me with this.”

* * *

“Oh,” Jack says, suddenly finding himself back on P3X-673 in all its uneventful glory, the gate shimmering as Daniel disappears into it. “Well then.” He’s not sure what he expected, but it seems like there should have been something more than a normal gate trip that ended with them standing in a clearing.

Sam looks around, her gaze finally settling on Jack. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Wanna go home?”

“Not really,” Sam says. She grimaces, finding the feeling of not wanting to go home a bit odd after spending almost a year trying to do exactly that.

“Hey,” Jack says, cupping her cheek with his palm. “Remember what I said.”

Sam nods and casts her eyes downward, wondering whether it really will be that easy. “Yeah.”

 _“Hey Jack, Sam? You guys okay back there?”_

“Yeah, Daniel. Carter tripped, that’s all. We’ll be right there.”

Sam laughs and looks up at him. “I tripped?”

“Yep.” He kisses her softly, a quick reminder that what’s between them isn’t going to be left behind. “Let’s go home. I for one can’t wait for my bed.” He puts his hand on the small of her back and walks them to the gate.

“That mattress was a little hard, wasn’t it?”

“And that shower.” He shudders. It was small and favored cold water.

“Oh,” Sam says, almost moaning at the thought. “Bathtub. I missed that.”

“You know, I have one of those.” He stops them right at the event horizon.

Sam lifts an eyebrow. “You take baths?”

“I could be convinced.” Jack smiles and gestures for her to go first.

Sam laughs and takes a deep breath before walking through.

Jack turns around and stares at the empty planet. “If I walk out into Nevada again, I’m gonna be really pissed, Alle.” He crosses his fingers and follows Sam.

General Hammond’s voice greets him. “Welcome back, SG-1.”


	9. (epilogue)

Sam sighs contently and rests her cheek on Jack’s chest. The noise of night bugs comes through the open windows in the cabin bedroom, the Minnesota summer cooling off enough to allow for windows instead of the air conditioning unit.

The debriefing from P3X-673 had taken a lot longer than General Hammond had anticipated, but at the end it seemed as though he was not at all surprised to find Jack’s retirement request at the back of the mission report. It hadn’t taken much convincing to get him to agree (though the Pentagon insisted Jack stay on in a civilian role) and to give Sam some time off.

Jack brings his arms up around Sam and gently strokes her back. He misses the longer hair, it’s chin-length now, but he thinks it’s a small price to pay for being back home and getting to be with her. “Happy?” It’s a silly question, considering that she’s naked and he’s naked and they’re in the bed at his cabin in their own reality, but it seems like the right one.

Sam chuckles and kisses his chest. She folds her hands and rests her chin on top. “Yeah,” she says with a smile. “You?”

“Absolutely.” He presses his lips against her forehead when she lays her head down again.

“You think they made it?” Sam asks after a few minutes.

Jack shrugs as best he can lying down. “Well, we’re still here.”

“We upgraded all of our weapons and they’re not supposed to show up for another twenty-five years. They’ll know to avoid this one.” The three weeks of leave she had been promised only came after two months of nonstop weapons modification.

Jack nods and blinks in the darkness. “I think they did.”

“Me too.” She closes her eyes and gradually drifts off to sleep.

* * *

Behind the white curtain hiding the staging area from the few rows of people considered important enough to invite, Jack smiles at his daughter. In a strapless white dress with her long, brown hair falling in a cascade of loose curls across her shoulders, she’s a far cry from the eight year-old he once had to rescue from a tree in their backyard. And then he realizes she isn’t wearing shoes. “Barefoot, Al?”

She smiles sheepishly. “It’s a beach,” she explains, digging her toes into the sand. She looks out across the blue waves, the sun just beginning to turn the sky pink and orange, and takes a deep breath.

“There’s still time to back out,” Jack offers with a smirk. He pulls her into a hug when she returns his smirk with one of her own. “I love you, Alle.”

“Love you too, Dad,” she whispers, hugging him tight.

Later that night, vows exchanged and toasts made and cake eaten, the tables are cleared away to make room for a dance floor. Torches line the beach, lighting up the party long after the sun has set and the twinkling stars appear. Jack offers his hand to Sam and she takes it with a smile.

“Good job saving the world,” he says. “Again.”

Sam laughs and kisses his cheek. “Well, your daughter helped.”

“Yeah. Time travel,” he muses. “Always makes my head hurt.”

“Don’t think about it, then,” she advises and rests her head on his shoulder as they sway to the slow music.


End file.
